“Each image is a captured moment, a reminder of my own journey as my privileged interaction with other people. Each image triggers a particular memory – a smell, or a sense of that moment. Above all, though, it’s the experience of travelling that quickens the spirit. It’s the fleeting impression of things – a particular moment on a river bank as your boat drifts past it, a subliminal response when you’re walking in the bush – that ignites the creative spark before the shutter fires.” - Travelling Light
Paul Weinberg is a South African born documentary photographer, filmmaker, writer, curator, educationist, and archivist. He began his career in the early 1980s by working for South African NGOs and photographing current events for news agencies and foreign newspapers.
He was a founder member of Afrapix and South, the collective photo agencies that gained local and international recognition for their uncompromising role in documenting apartheid, and popular resistance to it. From 1990 onwards he increasingly concentrated on feature rather than news photography.
Paul has built up a large body of work which portrays diverse peoples, cultures, and human environments ‘beyond the headlines’. It demonstrates a sustained engagement with indigenous people throughout southern Africa, particularly in rural settings.
His images have been widely exhibited and published, both locally and abroad. He has also initiated several major photographic projects, notably Then & Now, a collection of contrasting images by eight South African photographers taken during and after apartheid, which is traveling the world.
In 1993 he won the Mother Jones International Documentary Award for his portrayal of the fisherfolk of Kosi Bay on South Africa’s northern Natal coast.
He has taught photography at the Centre of Documentary Studies at Duke University in the United States and holds a master’s degree from the same university. He is currently senior curator of visual archives at the University of Cape Town and lectures in documentary arts at the same university.
Paul founded, with David Goldblatt, the Ernest Cole Award for creative photography in southern Africa. His works grace numerous important public, private and corporate collections and he has exhibited extensively both locally and abroad.