New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
Meet Jonna Algarin-Mojica, a 22-year-old IT Specialist with the National Guard.
After joining the military at the age of 19, he has had several contracts where he has worked with computer systems throughout the state of Massachusetts.
Towards the end of 2014, he was laid off, due to a lapse in contracts, and was without work for a few months. During that time period he picked up his camera and started experimenting with street photography. It was during this time period where his passion for photography exploded and he was able to really dedicate his time into getting better.
The Instagram community really pushed him harder and harder and has led to the success that Jonna has received in his short time as a photographer. After being featured in Street Dreams magazine, a quarterly photography magazine, which narrows down millions of submissions into a handful of lucky individuals and prints their work in the magazine.
While living in Milford in 2014 for a short period of time, he would constantly hear of the bad name that New Bedford had from the surrounding area. This encouraged and inspired him to be able to show the world that New Bedford didn’t have as bad of a rep as it seemed. In early September he was able to do just that, as he had been given a spotlight in the online blog Hypebeast, which has over 2 million viewers daily. Over the course of the weekend they posted his images of New Bedford, with little excerpts of his interview, talking about how great and inspiring the city is.
Today, Jonna is currently training for his new contract with the National Guard and chasing his photography dreams head on. He would love to see the community come together and work on accomplishing similar goals rather than trying to constantly cut each other off at the feet.
“Be yourself, there’s a lot of people that will guide you in the direction of what they think is right. You are only going to be happy or succeed if you are being true to yourself.”
Faces of New Bedford is a project by Colton Simmons. If you are interested in booking a shoot or getting prints from the series email all inquiries to colton@coltonsimmons.com
Follow Colton on Instagram: https://instagram.com/simmonscolton
