Source to Sea

In 2009, Jason Florio and Helen Jones-Florio circumnavigated the Republic of the Gambia by foot, a journey that took them more than five hundred miles around mainland Africa’s smallest country. The couple made formal portraits of the village chiefs they stayed with each night. Three years later, the Florios returned to the area for a six-hundred-and-fifty-mile trip along the Gambia River, one of Africa’s last major free-flowing rivers. Travelling first by motorcycle and then by canoe, they followed the river from its source, in the highlands of Guinea, through Senegal and the Gambia, to its outlet, at the Atlantic Ocean. Spurred by news that a hydroelectric dam would soon be built on the river, the Florios set out to document the communities along the Gambia’s watershed. Florio told me, “We travelled from source to sea, spending each night on the riverbank, where we camped with migrant fisherman, gold miners and sometimes under the protection of village chiefs. What we found were cultures and life styles facing massive potential changes with the impending construction of the dam.”