A journey of discovery in the Eastern Cape resulted in William Sheepskin's defining portrait, when he captured 14-year-old Vuyisanani Sinqoto in a photo that travelled to London's National Portrait Gallery.

The light was beginning to thin along a stretch of road in Alexandria in the Eastern Cape when a teenage boy in wire-frame "spectacles" lifted his face toward the camera.

That unguarded instant would travel far beyond that winter afternoon, to a wall of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and appearing in subways and on billboards as one of the standout images of this year's Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize.

For Cape Town photographer William Sheepskin (29), the journey that led to that moment feels almost unreal.

Sheepskin was drawn to Boshoek, a small farming area near Alexandria, where his father was born.

"I spent most of my teenage years in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, so South African heritage is something I didn't really grow up with. My dad is from the area where I made this portrait, a tiny farming valley called Boshoek, and that connection felt important to me.

"I wanted to spend time out there and try to understand what my childhood might have looked like if my dad had never left the farm. It's hard to imagine, especially because that way of life doesn't quite exist there any more, or at least, that's what I thought."...