This article was originally written by Lauren Beavis for SWNS — the U.K.’s largest independent news agency, providing globally relevant original, verified, and engaging content to the world’s leading media outlets.
You know what they say about one man’s trash: A sofa that was dumped in Gloucestershire, England, last year inspired amateur photographer Alex Elton-Wall to gather his community for a series of shots — and one of his images recently won a prestigious Portrait of Britain award.
Elton-Wall stumbled upon the two-seater sofa on the side of the road in the small village of Lydbrook in April. He has since taken the portraits of more than 150 nearby residents, who started adding living room items around it. “As people came down, they made the sofa their own — people came with their families, their dogs, the landlord and landlady of the pubs came down as well,” he told SWNS.
Within a few weeks of the project starting, the story went viral and was picked up by the media, with coverage including a photo essay in The Guardian and an episode of the CBC radio show As It Happens.
The winning shot features a 7-year-old girl named Amaya, and is one of 100 portraits displayed digitally across the country through early February as part of the contest, which is run by the British Journal of Photography. “I am over the moon,” Elton-Wall said of the award, adding that he’s “really thrilled” for Amaya. “I know she loves that her picture has won an award and people all over the country will be seeing it on the screens and billboards.”
The abandoned settee — now known as “The Lydbrook Lounge” — even has its own Facebook page where visitors posted photographs of themselves posing on it (the couch has since been removed, though its current whereabouts are unclear). And Elton-Wall wasn’t the only one whose creativity was sparked by the sofa. One woman created an oil painting of it and raffled it off to raise money for local playground equipment.
“When I started taking photos of people sitting on that stinky old fly-tipped sofa in my village last year, I couldn’t have imagined how things would have turned out,” said Elton-Wall. “It led to me producing a photobook, which I sold to raise money for a local charity. In November, the photos were exhibited at a great gallery called Clwb Ffoto in Newport South Wales, and now this award. That sofa is the gift that keeps on giving!”
Indeed, rarely has a couch provided so much more than a place to sit. “A piece of rubbish turned into something fun,” said Elton-Wall. “As an amateur documentary photographer, it has been a great opportunity to photograph the local community.”
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