Context of the artworks

“I began solo traveling in 2015. While I haven’t covered all 36 states in Nigeria, I have been to all the regions in the country. However, I am always in awe whenever I travel to the northern part of Nigeria - while Nigerians are quite colourful, there is an unmatched vibrancy that exists in the north.

In June 2019, while in Zaria for an assignment and subsequently a vacation, I seized the opportunity to capture the beauty, joy and colours that come with the Sallah celebration.”

To celebrate Black History Month, Colours of the North was used as a resource to teach photography to a group of young adults in the UK in 2020. The workshop was organised by Hundred Heroines.

About the artist

Etinosa Yvonne is a self-taught documentary photographer and visual artist based in Abuja, Nigeria. The primary focus of her work is on exploring and expressing themes related to the human condition and social injustice. She was one of six photographers selected for the 2020 cycle of the World Press Photo 6*6 Africa talent, and has received grants from Women Photograph, National Geographic in partnership with Lagos Photo and Art X, as well as an award from the Royal Photographic Society for her project, It’s All In My Head. Her works have been shown in selected group exhibitions and featured in several international publications.

Context of the artwork

Battle of Isandlwana is a photograph taken by Clint Strydom of the historic Isandlwana Battle site. During this battle, the British experienced their biggest defeat in their Colonial history when they clashed with the armies of King Cetshwayo.

This battle has become a symbol of Zulu and South African pride and Battalions from the United Kingdom still visit Isandlwana every year for battle re-enactments.

Living in KwaZulu Natal, Clint noticed that most of the monuments at Isandlwana speak from a British perspective. He wanted to create a body of artworks that celebrated the Zulu victory from an African perspective.

He visited the area and after seeking advice from the community, invited a respected member of the community to walk with him to the top of a hill that would provide a bird’s eye view of Isandlwana. The white stones mark the grave sites from the Battle of Isandlwana.

Clint waited for the right moment to take this final shot. On the fourth day, the skies began to ‘show off’ and Clint was able to capture the ‘victorious warrior’ against the backdrop of the rejoicing clouds. The skies that day evoke the warriors state of mind and are symbolic of the mighty power that the Zulu nation exerted over their enemies.

Context of the artworks

The image featured forms part of a body of work that explore the multiple layers found in our surroundings using light as a tool to identify the degree of visibility. The shadows in contrast with saturated images create a flattening in the images that encourages the viewer to consider a confrontation between the comfortable and the familiar with the dark and heavy elements of the environment. The swiftness of street photography allowed me to capture the bodies pronouncing gestures that recall intimacy in the conversations the figures carry with each other.

About the artist

Hailing from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, Eyoeal is passionate about photography and graphics design. Though he enrolled at Addis Ababa University’s school of Architecture, his true calling was in photography and graphic design and he dropped out of college. From a very young age, Eyoeal has been fascinated with graphics design and his passion for the art form generated a keen interest in photography. His works has been exhibited at Addis Foto Fest 2018, UPPA: East African Photography Award 2019 and has been published on Out of the Phone: Mobile street Photography book. 

Context of the artwork

Ritual offering, Vaal River, Maccauvlei area, Free State, 2011; from the series Legacy of the Mine “Jeremiah Stoaba and his wife Maria from the Apostolic Church of Zion perform an animal sacrifice on the banks of the Vaal River in the Maccauvlei area, on the periphery of the New Vaal Colliery. Two to three times a year they speak to the ancestral ‘river gods’ here. The banks of the Vaal River are rich in minerals, including coal, copper, gold, uranium and other associated minerals, yet is relatively unscarred by mining. There has been a lot of controversy around the award by the Department of Mineral Resources of prospecting rights to mining companies along the Vaal River. If the development of mining continues, it would have a major impact on the ecology of South Africa’s most important river.”

This work is part of a larger project and book which evolved over two and a half years into the Legacy of the Mine – an unflinching series that set out to expose the unwanted and perhaps under-explored legacy confronting South Africa’s land and people by giving agency to those whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by mining processes and the long-term environmental ramifications. 

Godfrey received the prestigious Ernest Cole Award in 2012 to complete this project. Legacy of the Mine was published by Jacana(2013) and launched in conjunction with solo exhibitions across South Africa. Since then, the project has received multiple international awards and accolades including the CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize, Leica Oskar Barnack Award, and the OPENPhoto Award. 

Various works from the project have been exhibited at leading photography festivals, galleries and 

museums including the Völklinger Hütte World Heritage Site, Germany; Lagos Photo Festival, Nigeria; Image Afrique, Switzerland; and the South African Jewish Museum.

About the artist

Ilan Godfrey's work explores the diverse social, political, economic and environmental currents that shape contemporary South Africa – giving viewers a broader, and at the same time more deeply personal, understanding of the country they live in. His photographic practice includes extensive research. Through a process of investigative narration and long-term, multi-layered projects, Godfrey focuses on the constantly shifting landscape and reveals varied aspects of societal change across the country, documenting the country with an in-depth and intimate conscience. 

His work has been recognised by various international photography awards and grants, and exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery (London), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), Wits Art Museum (Johannesburg), and Musée du quai Branly (Paris); Godfrey’s photographs have been featured in leading international publications such as The New Yorker, Le Monde Magazine, ZEIT Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Guardian Weekend Magazine and the Financial Times Magazine. Aside from his editorial work, he collaborates with institutions and organisations worldwide, regularly working on commissions for global brands, including the Open Society Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, MasterCard Foundation, Barclays Bank, VISA Card, Toyota Mobility Foundation and GlaxoSmithKline. 

He holds a BA (Hons) degree in Photography from the University of Westminster (London) and was awarded the David Faddy Scholarship to continue his studies, receiving an MA degree in Photojournalism from the same institution. Godfrey was awarded the Ernest Cole Award in 2012.

Context of the artwork

EarthSongs

Mik, cave church on the Orange River, that has been used by nomadic Nama communities as a place of worship for centuries, Pella, Northern Cape, 2021.

“EarthSongs is a project that explores and celebrates spiritual connections to the land in South Africa. While ‘land’ is a very contested issue, the way people have marked, and celebrated the land remains a critically important, often muted engagement, signifying re-imagining of the land and what the land can mean for a variety of its inhabitants.

In quiet ways beyond the news and headlines, people of all persuasions, faiths and spiritual engagements partake in rituals, formal and informal that mark the land in ways that align with their belief systems. Examples of this are spiritual sites of faith – pilgrimages, archaeological sites, natural wonders, and events where informally spiritual practice take place in the broadest way possible.

This project also explores lesser-known, off the beaten track or unrecognised, unusual sites of spiritual practice and ritual. My project is to look at the landscape and its transformation with regard spirituality. This is an amalgam of different and diverse connections, signifying spiritual connections to land in South Africa.”

This project is a continuation of Weinberg’s work in Moving Spirit, which explored spiritual practicesf a variety in southern Africa. 

About the artist 

Paul Weinberg is a photographer, curator, filmmaker, writer, 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 and in-depth projects. He has been published and exhibited widely over a period of 40 years.

In his career he has produced 18 books as a photographer and author, and has been published in many other anthologies and group projects. He taught photography at the Centre of Documentary Studies at Duke University (Durham, USA) and holds a master’s degree from the same university. Weinberg lectured in Documentary Arts and Visual Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and is currently a research associate at the Centre for South African Art and Visual Culture, University of Johannesburg.

Together with David Goldblatt, he founded the Ernest Cole Award for creative photography in southern Africa. He currently works as a curator, archivist, and photographer.

Context of the artwork

From the series 80 Miles to Atlantis

• By the yard III

• Tarfaya buried open door I 

“In 80 Miles to Atlantis, the second part of her work around the city of Tarfaya, Imane Djamil works closely with a group of friends born amongst the ruins, in search of a long-lost time they haven’t known, fantasised from a nostalgia point of view. Together, they reinvest in desolation as a playground and the ruin as an element to reclaim in this collaboration. The series interrogates the multiple layers of symbolism in the built and natural landscape, colonial architecture’s redefinition over time, and the blurring of lines between reality and myth. The themes her work explores are of poignant relevance to today’s world – the quest for a symbiosis between urban development and the natural environment, the state’s failure to uplift communities at the margins, and negotiating relationships between the colonial past and a post-colonial present and future.  

Through her practice, Djamil never ceases to confront the complexity of people vis-à-vis their physical environment. The title of the series refers to Tarfaya not by its name, but rather its close proximity to Spain’s Canary Islands, the approximate location of where the mythical Atlantis is rumoured to be. The title also likens Tarfaya to the fictional island nation – a fitting relation given that, like Atlantis, it is shrouded in mystery and often described as ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘the abandoned world.’ Working in an environment where interest in street photography and its candid, unmediated images of Moroccan daily life have exploded in the past decade, Imane Djamil stands out from her peers for her use of ‘docu-fiction’ to capture reality while simultaneously introducing fictional scenarios to strengthen its representation through a form of artistic expression.”

From 80 Miles to Atlantis catalogue text by Tina Barouti

About the artist

Imane Djamil is a Casablanca-based artist whose practice spans photography, storytelling, and creative writing. Her work, located at the crossroads of fine art and documentary photography, straddles a fine line between reality and the sublime in what she calls ‘mental geographies' and explores places in post-traumatic transition, where history engenders a metaphorical dialogue with personal anecdotes.

Djamil has participated in several residencies including Escales liées at the French Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy (2018); Mujeres yel Mediterráaneo at the Casa Mediterraneo in Alicante, Spain (2019); and most recently the Summer’s Lab at le Cube Independent Art Room in Rabat, Morocco (2020). Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe and Morocco, most notably as part of Le Maroc Contemporain at Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, France (2014) and En un instante: Marruecos at Casa Árabe as part of PHotoESPAÑA’s official selection (2018). In 2021, she was awarded the New Narratives in Environmental Photography prize by Fisheye magazine and La Gacilly Photo Festival for 80 Miles to Atlantis.

Context of the artwork

Miriam Makeba performing in Lesotho

Miriam Makeba sweats with emotion at a stage performance in Lesotho, 1981. Makeba, living in exile at the time, attended the event which Kumalo had organised with businessman Blowie Moloi.

Context of the artworks

From the series Images of Table Mountain

• District 6, Cape Town

• Gugulethu, Cape Town

• Nolungile Station, Khayelitsha, Cape Flats

“This shadow of guilt, of fear and denial – a shadow shadowed in turn by a bounteous and hysterical glee – is revealed in a strategic yet strikingly unmotivated way in David Lurie’s photographs. By unmotivated, I mean that Lurie does not intend to reveal to us the monstrosity of life lived at the foot of a mountain […] It is therefore a photographic project which does not appeal to the viewer’s conscience, but to a certain ethical nerve that is not wholly a matter of mind […] Lurie’s black and white photographs are shadow works, or, works caught in the physical and darkly mythic shadow of Table Mountain.

[…] None of these images are posed or stately. Rather, as if seen through a rear-view mirror, at once backwards and forwards, they quicken a nerve, combust a settlement, allowing the viewer a state of seeing that is neither that of the flaneur or the voyeur, but rather that of Iggy Pop’s passenger: ‘I am a passenger / and I ride and I ride…’

[…] Sometimes the mountain appears as a mere sliver on the distant horizon, sometimes it appears in fragments in the urban thicket. Never is the mountain memorialised. When the mountain dominates the frame it also engulfs it. As a long shot or close up the mountain invariably disturbs the frame. Never is the mountain steadied in a medium shot, and, as a consequence, never is the mountain naturalised or perceived as a normative framing register. This decision is not merely a perverse one. Rather, what this decision suggests is the complexity and the uncertainty of human habitation in relation to the mountain.”

• From ‘Shadow of the Mountain’ by Ashraf Jamal, Images of Table Mountain (Bell-Roberts, 2006).

Exhibitions of Images of Table Mountain include Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town; Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg; Hereford Photography Festival, UK; and Bonani Africa, Johannesburg. 

About the artist

David Lurie lives and works in Cape Town. He studied economics, politics and philosophy, taught philosophy, did research in international political economy at the London School of Economics, and worked as a consultant economist before turning to photography. Lurie lived for many years in London, where he began doing documentary projects part-time in 1990 and full-time from 1995, following the publication of his first book, Life in the Liberated Zone. He moved back to Cape Town permanently in 2011.

His work has been widely published and exhibited in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the Middle East. He is the recipient of several awards including Pictures of the Year International, the World Understanding Award for Cape Town Fringe: Manenberg Avenue is where it’s Happening; Nikon (UK); Ilford Pro Photo (SA); and Arts Council of Great Britain Grant Awards.

His monographs are Karoo – Land of Thirst (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2019); Daylight Ghosts (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018); Undercity – the other Cape Town (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2017); Images of Table Mountain, (Bell-Roberts, 2006); Cape Town Fringe: Manenberg Avenue is where it’s Happening, (Double Storey Books,2004); and Life in the Liberated Zone, (Cornerhouse, 1995). Dreaming the Street will be published by Skira in 2022.

Context of the artwork

Valued Families

“Valued Families comprises of two images overlaid. Beneath is a pinhole photograph of two women’s bodies close together; laid over this is a diagram of a ‘family’ tree of connecting names. The artwork speaks to how we construct our non-biological families and support networks. It inverts the phrase ‘a return to family values’, which is often cited as the answer to all ‘deviation’ and problems in the world by the popular press and conservative leaders.”

Valued Families has been included in numerous exhibitions, including Gay Rights Rites Re-writes, curated by Joan Bellis and Wessel van Huyssteen (Martin Melkhuis, Cape Town; Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein; Gertruse Posel Gallery, Johannesburg; University of Witwatersrand, 1995-1996); Lifetimes: an exhibition of Southern African art, curated by Ruth Sack and Nina Jacobson, as part of the Out of Africa Cultural Festival (Art Bureau, Munich, 1997); Holdings: refiguring the archive, curated by Jane Taylor (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1998); Regards Croises, as part of the 9th Aubenades de la Photographie (Le Château d’Aubenas, Aubenas, 2001); Ten years of Pinhole Photography, a solo exhibition invited by the association La salle d'attente (Saint-Exupery Cultural Centre, Reims, 2002); 40 years: artists and designers from the University of Stellenbosch, curated by Victor Honey (Sasol Art Museum, University of Stellenbosch, 2004); and Out of Site, a solo exhibition (Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town, 2013).

About the artist

Jean Brundrit teaches photography in the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and is a National Research Foundation rated researcher. Her research interests are primarily concerned with exploring the environment and identity – her work pertaining to identity is concerned with exploring lesbian identity and strategies of representation within a South African context. As a visual artist, she has exhibited extensively in South Africa and contributed to a number of international exhibitions.

Context of the artwork

A young lady rolls her eyes as she gets teased by a patrolling army officer. Lock down level 5, Alexandra, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2020

“Anxiety and fear increased as a national state of disaster was announced in March 2020.  Pressed into a morbid game of hide and seek we isolate. Soon after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the procedures for a 21-day lockdown, the South African National Defence Force were deployed to enforce the new reality and rules. Socially distanced shopping queues snake out into mall parking lots. Trollies overflow with supplies. The banning of liquor and cigarettes sales opened up a massive black market to fill the demand. We stood masked, sanitised, confused and silent. Our hospital systems sat uneasily knowing that it was just a matter of time before the tsunami would hit.  South Africa, already in a recession and freshly demoted to ‘junk status’ when the virus arrived, was told to stay home. For many this meant no income, no future. 

[…] For many, the walls started closing in and hunger overcame Covid as the most pressing concern.  In-between family duties I would traverse the city, I have found, and share, many stories of heartbreak and many visions of a nation at war, not only with a pandemic but also with itself.  I needed to shoot life in this time of change. I looked at the dramas and the dramas spoke to me through the images they offered up.  Does that mean that all the images are pictures of despair? Indeed, there is plenty of that.  But the South African street remains a place of resilience and survival. It has always been that way, and I hope to show that ordinary life goes on, and will flourish, despite this global setback.”  

Time Between was selected for the Corona Call group exhibition, in association with Sana Sanaa, Fahrbereitschaft Haubrok, Berlin, 2020

About the artist

Marc Shoul lives and works in Johannesburg. He works largely in portraiture and documentary photography that observes complex social issues. Shoul graduated from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University with a BTech in Photography in 1999. 

He has had solo exhibitions at: The South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town (2018); Musée Pierre Noël, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France (2017); Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, USA (2015); Extraspaszio Gallery, Rome, Italy (2013); Pretoria Art Museum (2012); Quai 1, Vevey, Switzerland (2010); and Atelier de Visu, Marseille, France (2013), where he also completed an artists’ residency. Shoul’s work has been featured at the screenings of Visa Pour L’Image, Perpignan, France and the Ankor Photographic Festival, Siem Reap, Cambodia. His series Landsman featured at Addis Foto Fest 2018, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Shoul won the WinePhoto photographic competition with Brakpan and received an honourable mention for Flatlands in 2011. 

His work is included in the collections of the Iziko South African National Gallery, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum, as well as The Memmo Foundation in Rome, Italy. He is represented by Panos Pictures in London, UK.

About the artist

Lindokuhle Sobekwa is a South African photographer born in Katlehong, Johannesburg. He was introduced to photography in 2012 through his participation in the Of Soul and Joy Project – a photography project in Thokoza, a township in the southeast of Johannesburg. During this time, he studied with photographers Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi.

Sobekwa began exhibiting his work in 2013 as part of a group show in Thokoza, organised by the Rubis Mécénat foundation. His photo essay, Nyaope, was published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa) in 2014. Nyaope was also published in Vice magazine’s annual Photo Issue and the De Standaard (Belgium) in the same year and exhibited at the Turbine Art Fair as part of their new artist feature exhibition. In 2015, Sobekwa was awarded a scholarship to study at the Market Photo Workshop where he completed his Foundation Course. Nyaope was exhibited in the ensuing group show, Free from My Happiness, organised by Rubis Mécénat for the International Photo Festival of Ghent (Belgium); the exhibition toured to additional sites in Belgium and South Africa. A publication, edited by Tjorven Bruyneel, included a selection of the works.

In 2017 Sobekwa was selected by the Magnum Foundation for Photography and Social Justice, New York, to develop the project I carry Her photo of Me. He received the Magnum Foundation Fund to continue with his long-term project, Nyaope, in 2018. Sobekwa’s work has been exhibited in South Africa, Iran, Norway and the USA, and was presented by several galleries at the 2019 edition of Paris Photo. His hand-made photobook, I carry Her photo with Me was included in African Cosmologies at the FotoFest Biennial Houston, curated by Mark Sealy. He joined Magnum Photos in 2018 and became an associate member in 2020.

About the artist

Greg Marinovich is a highly regarded photojournalist, filmmaker and author who distinguished himself photographing the fatal conflicts that preceded the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991 for a series of photographs of African National Congress supporters murdering a man they suspected of being an Inkatha Freedom Party spy. 

Marinovich co-authored a non-fiction book The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (Basic Books, 2000) with João Silva that took readers beyond the photographs, giving context to that tumultuous time as well as many personal stories of those involved. He won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in 2017 for Murder at Small Koppie: The real story of the Marikana Massacre, an investigative account of the events leading up to the killing of 34 striking miners in South Africa on 16 August 2012. His book Shots from the Edge: A Journalist's Encounters with Conflict and Resilience, in which he documents his experiences covering war and conflict throughout Africa and the world, was published in 2019 (Penguin Randomhouse). 

In 2009, Marinovich was the recipient of the Nat Nakasa award for courageous journalism; and from 2013-14 was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. 

FRISBEE: An African National Congress aligned Self Defence Unit member plays frisbee next to blankets on a line and a severely cut tree at a braai at a safehouse in Thokoza township, South Africa, 1995. 

“This Self Defence Unit was under the command of Bonga Nkosi and had some of the youngest child soldiers among their fighters in the most contested section of the so called 'Dead Zone' between the Inkatha Freedom Party controlled migrant workers hostels and some surrounding houses and the ANC aligned residential suburbs.”

This is the first public showing of this image, shot as part of Marinovich’s work on the child soldiers at the front lines during the end of apartheid. 

Context of the artworks

amaNtombazane, esiPongweni

amaNtombazane prepare for the celebrations of a coming-of-age ritual (umemulo); esiPongweni, Keates Drift, KwaZulu-Natal. 

Siqhandolo Mzila, esiPongweni

amaNtombazane prepare for the celebrations of a coming-of-age ritual (umemulo); esiPongweni, Keates Drift, KwaZulu-Natal. 

Sunlight, Keates Drift

Married women outside the trading store on the main road; Keates Drift, Kwazulu-Natal.

“I collaborated with Louise Meintjes on a dance project that resulted in the book, Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2017), which received two awards. In March 2018, the university sponsored an exhibition of my photographs at the Rubenstein Art Centre, Durham. While the book is published in black and white, the exhibition included large colour prints. Another public exhibition was held for the community in the esiPongweni Community Centre.”

About the artist

TJ Lemon began his career in photography in the 1980s as a student covering events at the small university town of Makhanda (then Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Lemon was a lecturer in Photojournalism at Rhodes University from 1988–1989. He had three exhibitions in Makhanda before moving to Johannesburg in 1990, where he was appointed as director and trainer at the newly formed Market Photo Workshop. Lemon was also a contributor to the photographers’ collective Afrapix. 

After the 1994 elections, he took a staffer position at Independent Newspapers and became chief photographer of The Sunday Independent. He pursued news and feature work as required, but enjoyed the versatility a weekly publication offered. Lemon began writing for his picture features and went on to win a World Press Photo award (2001) for his photo-essay, Oswenka, the Jeppe Hostel Swankers.

In 2010, he left Independent Newspapers to pursue freelance work and long-term photographic projects. Lemon taught in the Journalism department, Wits University, from 2013–2015. He collaborated with Louise Meintjes from Duke University on the book, Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (2017), and an exhibition in Durham (2018). His exhibition, Comrades, Warriors and Volkstaat Kommandos, was shown at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda (2019).

About the artist

Matt Kay is a photographer based in Durban, South Africa. Kay studied at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and is currently completing a fine arts master’s program through the University of the Witwatersrand.

He was the recipient of the Ithuba Arts Trust and the Tierney Fellowship in 2014, during which he was mentored by David Goldblatt. Over the past few years, he has been nominated for several awards, including the Gabriele Basilico Prize in Architecture and Landscape Photography (2015) and PDN global top 30 emerging photographers edition (2016/2017). He was shortlisted for the CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize in 2021.

Kay’s solo exhibition, The Front, was shown at the KZNSA Gallery in Durban; his work, Losing Ground, was shown in the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography in Switzerland (2016).

Context of the artwork

The Jockey and his horse

This photograph is part of an ongoing project, The Horse Men, which seeks to look at the bond between horse owners, grooms, jockeys, and their horses. 

About the artist

Misper Apawu is a photographer based in Accra, Ghana. Her photographic journey started in 2018 when she attended a mentorship program for six months. In 2019, she made the decision to pursue photography fulltime. She uses the medium to learn about communities, and focus on the social, physical, and emotional aspects of daily life. Apawu wants her photographs to reveal the similarities and differences in everyone's world. She is a member of African Women Photograph and the African Photojournalism Database. She exhibited her work during the Nuku Photo Festival in Ghana, 2018.

Context of the artwork

Horse grazing in field near Kriel Power Station – Kriel, Mpumalanga

This work is from Daylin Paul’s Broken Land, for which he was awarded the prestigious Ernest Cole Award. The series examines the coal-fuelled climate change and human rights crisis in Mpumalanga province, South Africa. 

As Paul comments, “These power stations, while providing electricity for an energy desperate South Africa, also have a devastating and lasting impact on the environment and the health of local people. […] Vast tracts of fertile, arable land are being ripped up, the landscape scarred with the black pits of coal mines while coal-burning power stations, are one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world.”

Paul looks at both the micro and macro issues of coal with a documentarian’s eye: recording evidence and conducting interviews as a journalist would, but also interpreting landscapes and scenes as an artist. The photographs in this series look for traces of the subtle, paradoxical tragedy that haunts the both the land and the people of Mpumalanga: blessed with unfathomable mineral wealth, but cursed by the industries that extract and burn it. 

Broken Land was exhibited at KZNSA Gallery, Durban; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; and FORMS Gallery, Cape Town. The monograph (Jacana, 2019) was longlisted for the 2021 National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences awards. 

About the artist

Daylin Paul is an independent photographer, writer and educator. He is a graduate from Rhodes University, School of Journalism. After starting his career as press photographer in Cape Town, he decided to work as an independent photographer and travelled to East Asia where he was a stringer for Penta Press photo agency (Seoul, South Korea), and a gallery assistant at Documentary Arts Asia (Chiang Mai, Thailand). 

After five years in Asia, Paul returned to South Africa and worked for various leading news organisations, both local and international. His work during the FeesMustFall protests in 2015 and 2016 drew critical acclaim and global recognition, and was published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy. Subsequently, he was a regional finalist in the Vodacom Journalist of the Year awards (2017). 

It was during this time that he began moving away from photojournalism and into documentary photography. Paul was awarded the prestigious Ernest Cole Award in 2017 for his work on coal mining and burning in the Mpumalanga Highveld. This project was published as his debut monograph, Broken Land, and exhibited widely.

He teaches in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography program at the Market Photo Workshop, and is a writer and contributor to a number of local and international NGO’s and development agencies.

Hoist the Flag #EndSARS

A protester hoists different flags that read "Reform the Police", "SARS SWAT We Don't Want" and "Buhari #ENDSARS SWAT" at a protest in Alausa, Lagos State Nigeria, during the #End SARS movement. 11 October 2020.

“In this photograph, a protester hoists a flag while standing atop a truck, in an electric moment of national pride and solidarity.” This work was exhibited at Art X Lagos, 2020.

Conext of the artwork

Apparat, from the series Rédemption

From the time he moved to Grand-Bassam, Balnéaires took interest in the many environmental challenges that exist there. Discussions on the issue with the inhabitants of the village as well as with specialised NGOs opened his eyes to the complexity and depth of the problem. Between the waste that arrives from the Atlantic Ocean and that dumped by the population for lack of alternatives, the surrounding nature bears the after-effects of an exacerbated human impact. In Rédemption, objects found on beaches are the raw material. Balnéaires collects objects along the coast, sculpts forms and dresses them up, as if to show solidarity with a distressed nature.

About the artist

Nuits Balnéaires is a visual artist based in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire. His practice is articulated between photography and film, and he plays a key role in the emerging Ivorian art scene. After completing his studies in Business Management, he decided to devote himself to fashion photography and collaborated with brands such as Lagos Fashion & Design Week and Vlisco & Co.

In 2019, Balnéaires settled in Grand-Bassam to focus on his art. During the same year, his documentation of the floods in Grand-Bassam earned him a one-year visual journalism scholarship with the World Press Photo Foundation. He is the first Ivorian to be selected for this coveted award. In 2020, he was one of the winners of the Cultural and Environmental Responses for Environmental Change initiated by the Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe Institute. 

Balnéaires is part of the collection of Foundation Donwahi and his work has been exhibited in Côte d'Ivoire, New York, Toronto, Montreal, Melbourne, and Amsterdam.

Context of the artwork

Dropping In

Godfather of Nigerian surfing, Godspower Pekipuma, dropping in at Lighthouse Left on Tarkwa Island, Lagos, Nigeria.

About the artist 

“Alan van Gysen is one of the world’s most respected surf photographers. With an inextinguishable drive and natural flair, he has spent the past twenty years carving his mark into the international scene. His dedication to his craft has captured the artistry of South Africa’s and the world’s top surfers.” – Brendon Bosworth

As a surf photojournalist, he has travelled the planet to cover stories for major surfing magazines. His lens has also reached beyond the commercial and the well-known surfing personalities and predictable narratives, to tell the story of lesser-known African surf culture. Van Gysen’s work offers surfers from the continent a voice and place in a highly commercialised industry, presenting a counter-vision to how surfing is generally projected. 

He is also involved in projects like The 9 Miles Project and Waves for Change that have been crucial in supporting at-risk youth to be part of a sport that is often considered exclusionary and elitist. At present he is working with the team from Mami Wata on AfroSurf – the first book of its kind to document African surf culture, which has already received international backing and interest.

Context of the artwork

Usana luhoye, from Inside My Heart

​In 2015, Lindeka Qampi decided it was time to turn her lens onto herself and her immediate family after she had penned a poem, Inside My Heart, to her late mother: “I have never written a poem before, but I knew I needed to say these words”.

As the series developed through her exploration of self-portraiture, she also investigated other modes of expression. Inside My Heart also includes video work, drawings, and objects made by the artist.

Usana luhoye was included in Qampi’s recent solo exhibition, Ukufa kusembizeni, at the Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town, 2021.

About the artist

Lindeka Qampi is a self-taught South African artist and photographer. She began taking photographs in 2006, when she met members of the Iliso Labantu (the eye of the people), a community-based photo collective. At the start she worked as a street photographer, photographing weddings, events, and portraits. Soon she moved on to exploring her community in different ways, documenting the lives of ordinary people. Her photographs express the poetry and politics of the ‘ordinary act’ and therein the potential of imagining new possibilities for the future. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad.

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In 2011, Qampi developed a series of photographs for New York University master’s student, Shady Patterson, which featured township fashions – Clothing and Dress in South African Townships in the Post-ApartheidEra which set out to “explore and interrogate the sartorial landscape of impoverished communities to reveal traditional influences in economically oppressed and media saturated societies”. Qampi went on to produce her own series of photographs, Material Culture, within the trajectory of ‘township fashion’ and ‘street culture’.

Since 2012, and alongside developing her own career as practicing photographer, Qampi has been the project facilitator for Inkanyiso, an activist platform founded by photographer, Zanele Muholi. One of their projects, Empathetic Eyes, led them to Benin where they presented photography workshops which focused on violence against woman. In 2015, they participated in a Visual Activism Cultural Exchange Project. Muholi and Qampi were acknowledged for their outreach work with a Brave Award in 2016.

Context of the artwork

Nomonde Mthandande, from the series Cuttings 1820 – 2020

“Cuttings 1820– 2020 is an enquiry into the difficulty of disentangling our histories through visual storytelling pivoting around the relationship between female descendants of the Eastern Cape Xhosa and the 1820 British Settlers in South Africa. Using clothing and portraiture as a metaphor to symbolise power and identity, this body of work marks 200 years since the 1820 British Settlers landed in South Africa.Two centuries later, female descendants from Xhosa and 1820 Settler families make dresses and sit for portraits, wearing their histories.

The dresses indicate how fabrics represent tangled post-colonial complexities and identity, disrupting the notion that fine art and refined arts and craft were typically associated only with white Europeans. Stylistically informed by carefully composed portraits by Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita, the work speaks to the democratic camera and the relevance of vernacular photography.

This is a tribute to grief, loss and mourning, woven around family, history, displacement and memory. The thread and fabric connect us to what we have lost, bonding us to the past and the present. We can’t disentangle ourselves from the history of where we come from. Memory is a tapestry of relationships. This work is about heritage, history, kin and remembrance.”

Cuttings 1820 – 2020 was exhibited at the GFI Art Gallery, Gqeberha (former Port Elizabeth) in August 2020. 

About the artist

Pippa Hetherington is a South African photographer who has been working as an independent photojournalist with a human rights focus.  She is co-founder of Behind the Faces – a pan-African women’s storytelling project, launched at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, in 2013.  Her work has been published in international and national publications.

Hetherington’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, and Gqerbeha (South Africa); London (UK); Dublin (Ireland); and New York City and Washington, DC, (USA). She graduated with an MFA from ICP-Bard, New York, in May 2019.

Context of the artowrk

Belinda

Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie, a drag artist and activist, poses at a shisanyama – a community space where women cook and sell meat – in Khayelitsha, a township located on the Cape Flats, near Cape Town, South Africa. 4 August 2019.

This image was exhibited in 45 countries as part of the World Press Photo Awards exhibition, 2020, and is currently part of the Pride Photo Award exhibition touring the Netherlands.

About the artist 

Lee-Ann Olwage is a visual storyteller from South Africa. She is interested in using the medium of photography as a mode of co-creation and celebration. With her long-term projects, she aims to create a space the where people she collaborates with can play an active part in the creation of images that they feel tells their stories in a way that is affirming and celebratory.

In 2020, she was awarded a World Press Photo Award, Palm Photo Prize shortlist, CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize shortlist, Marilyn Stafford Fotoreportage Award shortlist, IPA Honorable Mention, and selected for The New York Times portfolio review. She is a member of Native Agency, Women Photograph and African Women in Photography.

About the artist 

Abdo Shanan was born in Oran, Algeria. He studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Sirte, Libya, until 2006. In 2012, Shanan undertook an internship at Magnum Photos, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on his photographic approach and create his first story for the magazine, Rukh. His photographs have been published by several print and online magazines and newspapers.

In 2015, Shanan received a nomination for the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund; in the same year he co-founded the Algerian photographers’ collective, Collective220. A year later, his series Diary: Exile was selected for the Addis Foto Fest. He was awarded the 2019 CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize for his ongoing project, Dry. In the same year, he was selected for the World Press Photo Foundation’s Joop Swart Masterclass. In 2020, he won the Premi Mediterrani Albert Camus Incipiens award and co-curated Narratives from Algeria, together with Danaé Panchaud, at PasquArt Photoforum in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.

“Diary: Exile started spontaneously and without direction in 2014. When I started it, I thought I was documenting the life of my grandmother, who suffers from severe memory loss. But many months later, as I looked back at the photographs, I realised that I was creating a diary of myself and for myself. The spontaneous nature of the project kept it instinctive rather than premeditated.

Exile has become a defence from the prefabricated reality, a shield that will protect who I am. Surrounded by solitude, disappointment, fears of the ticking of time, of growing old, of accomplishing nothing. The country has changed. Or perhaps it is just different from the image I created in my head while I was abroad to compensate for my feelings of nostalgia and homesickness while I was growing into a man. Reality hits hard. Accept it and change or refuse it. There may be another way around. A place where you can create your own path away from the expectations and predefined roles and identities.”

About the artist

Ronald Ngilima (1914 – 1960) was born in the Eastern Cape and moved to Gauteng in the early 1930s. Employed at Dinglers Tobacco Company, he dedicated his free hours to his trade as an ambulant photographer, cycling to various parts of Benoni. The present collection only starts in the 1950s, when he moved to a house in Wattville, big enough to set up his own photographic darkroom.

After his sudden death in 1960, his eldest son Torrance took over the photography trade for another five years, before he committed himself to his political involvement with the ANC. In subsequent years, Ronald’s wife Sarah Ngilima carefully kept the 25 boxes of negatives locked up in a cupboard. They re-emerged some thirty years later, in 1999, when grandson Farrell Ngilima rediscovered them by chance. Realising the historical value of the collection, Farrell played a pivotal role in the establishment of the collection as a public archive. The original negatives are presently stored at Historical Papers, an independent archive based at Wits University, Johannesburg.

These works are from the photographic archive of Ronald Ngilima, dating from the late 1940s until his death in 1960. In 2008, Farrell Ngilima was joined by Sophie Feyder, who was at the time a visual researcher and PhD student from the Leiden University in the Netherlands. The Ronald Ngilima collection – a vernacular photographic archive – became the subject of Feider’s PhD study and several published journal articles..

Ngilima’s work has been featured in Rise and Fall of Apartheid; Just Ask!, by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Chris Dercon and Simon Njami; Commonplace, by Tamsyn Adams and Sophie Feyder; and African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies, edited by Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury.

The works offered on auction were included in The Other Camera exhibition and book (2014). The Other Camera was shown at the World Museum, Stockholm; Commune1, Cape Town; Centre for African Studies Gallery, University of Cape Town; and the Wits Origins Centre, Johannesburg.

Context on the artwork

Ma and Yoyo, Kensington, Johannesburg,1979

This photograph is from The Ma Series, of the photographer’s mother, Phua Sen Wah, who suffered from mental illness over the last decade of her life. Han was her primary caregiver and documented her slow decline, understanding her trauma, loss, and dislocation as a Chinese migrant fleeing from war. As a first generation South African, he explored the subject of belonging and freedom through his work – photographing those closest to him and the South African Chinese community.

About the artist

Henion Han (1952–2018) was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Chinese immigrant parents. Self-taught as a photographer and under the mentorship of David Goldblatt, his photographic body of work includes The Ma Series, which documents his mother and the South African Chinese community from the 1970s to the 1980s. A founder member of the Market Photo Workshop, he became a master darkroom practitioner, printing for David Goldblatt, and exhibited throughout the 1980s.Han returned to photography at age 60, working in India and his home suburb of Johannesburg, Troyeville. His work has been exhibited at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Market Photo Gallery, and Pentax Gallery.

In 1984, after completing his Honours degree in Film at the University of Witwatersrand, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. His thesis film, Utter, was awarded the Raymond Nelson Fellowship and screened at many festivals including the New York Film Festival.  Returning to Johannesburg in 1988, he became a highly successful editor, working on 41 documentaries, five feature films, and 38 educational films.  He directed two documentaries on the Truth and Reconciliation process, the acclaimed film Passages about J.M. Coetzee, and a seminal film about belonging – Letter to my Cousin in China (1999) – which was awarded Best Documentary by the South African Guild of Editors.

Context of the artwork

Klein Slangkop, from the series December

“December is a series of images taken over consecutive family holidays in Cape Town, South Africa. From the busy metropolitan city of Johannesburg to the space and quiet that Cape Town has to offer, it has become a time of nature and reconnection. Family photographs are often taken in moments of happiness and become important markers of the passing of time. There is a desire to hold onto these moments in a concrete manner, so that we can look back on a time gone by and somehow relive an experience. The photographs are tied so precisely to a particular instant in time, that they remind us of a moment lost forever, a person no longer there.” 

About the artist

Michelle Loukidis received her photographic training at Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa. She worked as a highly successful wedding photographer for over a decade. However, her keen interests in photographic development led her to the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, where she has trained and mentored young photographers for over 15 years – many of whom have received important grants and mentorships through her guidance. Through this process, she has also helped train photographers from other African countries, facilitating workshops in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and republic of Cabo Verde. 

Her photographs have been shown in various solo and group exhibitions, including a recent solo exhibition, Recesses, at Res gallery, and participation in group exhibitions at the Turbine Art Fair, The Fringe and the Association for Visual Arts in Cape Town. She also participated in the first Everard Read Photographic Mesh series (2018), which aimed at acquainting audiences with critical photographic practices. 

Loukidis prefers working in film, using analogue medium format cameras, where she feels a certain amount of the magic of photography is still retained. She works and lives in Johannesburg.

Context of the artwork

 Man as an Object / Man as an Animal  

The idea for this series is connected to the stories and tales I heard in my childhood and which still follow me everywhere today. These are stories designated for "the black child", as Senghor put it. For these photographs, I am inspired by the stories that are in my head and then I create objects in the service of those stories. Ideas sometimes come to me at night, while I’m lying in my room. before falling asleep, I sometimes dream with my eyes open. I am looking, I am always groping a little. They are fairly simple portraits, which symbolize one aspect of a story. My use of objects as accessories or costumes for men also relates to the African masks, so well made, today preserved in museums. I leave this context of the traditional African mask, linked to specific customs and beliefs, to move towards something that is more of the order of waste. Often, I even ask the model to make this mask object himself. It has to be artisanal, it is very important. I, as a photographer, set up this device, in order to place the stories that I have heard behind masks, that the young people I photograph have tinkered with recovered things. These are stories I have never lived, these are stories I am told, stories like dreams. When we dream, we believe we are fully living something, and then when we wake up, we realize that it was not reality, and we no longer know what was deep and what was on the surface. So it’s a bit like that Man as an Object : these are stories like dreams, but they work as moral lessons, stories that teach us how to behave in life. Which helps us understand what lies ahead, what can happen. And also what is the link between man and object. It is through stories that one can learn to gain affections towards objects, animals, trees, nature, and more. 

About the artist

Born in Mali, Fatoumata Diabaté’s photography career started at the PromoFemmes Audiovisual Training Center in Bamako. In 2002, she was one of the first women to join the Bamako Photography Training Promotion Center, which aims to professionalise Malian photographers.

Diabaté has been invited to many international festivals and has received several awards, including the Africa Creation prize from the French Association of Artistic Action for her work, Touaregs, in gestures and in movements. She has participated in the Rencontres de Bamako (2005, 2009, 2011, 2019), La Gacilly Photo Festival (2017,) as well as the Voices Off festival of the Rencontres d’Arles (2018), and the Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain Dak’Art. Her work has shown in several group and solo exhibitions in Mali and internationally.