1 in 168 professional footballers in the UK are South Asian and Saffi Ullah just made that statistic impossible to look away from.
Two regulars were debating this over their espressos this morning and by the time they'd finished the whole house had pulled up a seat.
Saffi Ullah is a Bengali photographer and director based in London who reached out personally to share a project he'd been working on. The house is glad he did.
Change The Score is a pro-bono campaign made in collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy for Sporting Bengal United. What caught the house's attention wasn't the message. It was the thinking behind how the message was visualised. Saffi took a statistic and made it physical, placing one South Asian player amongst 168 mannequins in a single frame.
As a piece of visual problem solving it's one of the most considered things we've seen this year.
What gives the campaign its second layer is the portrait series that follows. Saffi spent time across East London photographing his own community, friends, local business owners and grassroots players, documenting a football culture through an intimate and personal lens. The portraits are warm, specific and entirely unperformed.
They carry the quality that only comes when a photographer is completely at home in the world they are documenting, and that ease is visible in every frame.
The art direction across both parts of this campaign holds together with a coherence that feels effortless and clearly wasn't. Two very different visual approaches serving a single idea without either one pulling against the other. That's harder to achieve than the finished work makes it look.
The house pulled another round espresso and kept looking. Some work rewards that kind of attention.
Open All Hours is a digital coffee house for creatives who care about design, brand, and the ideas shaping culture. If you want to join the conversation in the house as it happens come and follow us on Instagram at Open All Hours
The espresso is always on.
Shot of the good stuff.
