Graeme Williams photographed South Africa’s transition to democracy. He is now revisiting Johannesburg’s inner city with his camera – as well as other significant places he photographed during the violent struggle here. He says that while the Apartheid system around which photography revolved in the 1980s is gone, it doesn’t mean that South Africa has arrived as an healthy and equitable society.
“I never had this feeling of, okay, ja, ra, ra, for democracy. You know I don’t actually care what it is, as long as it’s an equitable society. And you know, I would say, we have a form of democracy now but I certainly don’t think it’s a very healthy society. So the situation, for me, hasn’t changed that much. The big Apartheid is gone, but it doesn’t mean we have a healthy and happy society,” Williams says in the video interview.
A full, wide-screen version of the videos are located here.
If the video loads slowly, or ‘hangs,’ you could click the HD symbol in the play bar and change it to SD.
You can read more about the project here. To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
Themba Hadebe, now an Associated Press, AP, photographer, grew up in Thokoza, a township near Johannesburg. In the early 90s, “black-on-black violence” between the African National Congress, ANC, and the Inkatha Freedom Party, IFP, flared there. It was largely orchestrated by the Apartheid government to delay its own demise. Hadebe, who had wanted to become a photographer since childhood, prevailed against prejudice and ended up working alongside the world’s conflict photographers who gathered here.
Exploring a photo he took after the democratic elections, and that earned him a World Press Photo award, Hadebe, in the video interview, says democracy in South Africa is not as idyllic as it may look to outsiders. And that photographers are still very much needed here to tell the truth. “In a way, it’s an embarrassing picture, but in a way again, it’s a picture that says we are now a society that is affected by whatever can affect you anywhere in the world – crime.
“But at the same time, it’s the survival of the fittest. After the democracy, everybody had high expectations and so forth. And now suddenly, the reality is the opposite. You know, people were expecting, you know, jobs, good jobs… But now, suddenly, things are not like that, which is the reality. Things get hyperventilated, you know, the expectation, and once in the democracy, you look around and the situation is still the same.
“And those who made promises, they are also suddenly stuck with the reality, that you know, being a government, it doesn’t mean that you have money on your pocket all the time to splash it out. You know, there are a whole lot of issues around as well. Even the society is realizing, ‘Oh, the democracy … does not translate to food and … a good job. It’s just an act moving forward,’ he says. “It can be meaningless as well, if it’s not properly managed.”
A full, wide-screen version of the videos are located here.
If the video loads slowly, or ‘hangs,’ click the HD symbol in the play bar and change it to SD.
You can read more about the project here. To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
Santu Mofokeng photographed township life and the struggle against Apartheid. He is since known for his eerily empty and beautiful landscapes, and often their connection to ancestral worship there.
When we meet at Mofokeng’s home in Johannesburg, the photographer describes how he after democracy turned his camera away from the social ills of poverty and inequality. He says he realized that people living in squalor here wasn’t simply due to the racial inequalities of Apartheid but exists because market capitalism rules the day. “Apartheid had more to do with economic exploitation, cheap labour or criminal economics,” Mofokeng tells PhotographyAndDemocracy.com.
Looking back to the early 90s, Mofokeng continues: “Now that we are a democracy, I don’t have to tell the South African story. … After ’94, when we exceed to market capitalism, … I thought, what is the point … you say people are poor, or people are sick, or people don’t have running water. Wherever you find capitalism … you will find the rich and the very poor … I couldn’t find legitimation for what I do, unless I thought I had an answer to capitalism.”
He asks: “What am I saying if I say capitalism is bad? What is better? Communism?”
Hear more from Mofokeng himself; watch the video.
I would suggest opening Mofokeng’s excellent portfolio website in a separate window, as reference, while you watch the video. There you can peruse a career-long collection of Mofokeng’s photo essays, and his insightful and poetic writings about them.
Mack Magagane is a young South African photographer emerging from the Market Photo Workshop, which has played a big role in training photographers here, ensuring that visual literacy reaches neglected and marginalised parts of society. The school was founded by photographer David Goldblatt in 1989.
Mack and I meet at Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg, where he shows some of his work of the inner city. The photographer explains how he first braved the night, shooting with a tripod from city rooftops, creating a body of work called “Light Hours.” He then decided to get down on the ground, hurrying along (for safety reasons) almost snatching precious and elusive moments, to photograph “… in this city”.
Compared to a previous generation of photographers who dealt with legacy issues of Apartheid, Mack says he feels free to use photography purely for the sake of artistic expression.
“Photography has really kind of moved into other realms. I’d say, it’s actually really changed. We live in a democratic country, yes. It’s freedom, freedom of expression also. I can pick up a camera and decide on a little story I want to tell, deciding on a certain subject, or subject matter, and actually tell it as how I want to.
“… In that era of Apartheid, you couldn’t really give a certain viewpoint of something and you couldn’t really have freedom of expression, as your freedom had already been taken from you,” Mack says in the video interview on PhotographyAndDemocracy.com
A full, wide-screen version of the videos are located here.
If the video loads slowly, or ‘hangs,’ click the HD symbol in the play bar and change it to SD.
You can read more about the project here. To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
David Goldblatt has been critically exploring South African society with his camera for six decades, starting during Apartheid. We meet at Goldblatt’s home in Johannesburg to talk about his most recent work on ex-offenders and his reflections about South Africa’s democracy.
It’s been almost 20 years since the country went to the polls to elect its first democratic government in 1994. And even though great strides were made, Goldblatt says democratic values are in danger of being eroded here at the moment.
“It’s part of a general slide that we’ve been witnessing … into a state in which corruption – and by this I don’t just mean corruption in the sense of taking money and taking bribes – I mean corruption of values,” Goldblatt says in an interview on PhotographyAndDemocracy.com.
A full, wide-screen version of the videos are located here.
If the video loads slowly, or ‘hangs,’ click the HD symbol in the play bar and change it to SD.
You can read more about the project here. To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
Jodi Bieber – who won her 10th World Press Photo Award last year – has travelled all over the world, but still prefers to call South Africa home. When we meet at her Johannesburg flat to do the video interview, she says that both her own pictures and the country has become a lot brighter since she became a photographer at the dawn of democracy here.
That’s when she began a 10-year project documenting youth growing up on the fringes of society. The work became a book called ‘Between Dogs and Wolves: Growing Up with South Africa.’
Although the setting for the photographic body of work is South Africa, and largely Johannesburg, the work isn’t really about a specific location, but about the place ‘between the darkness and the light,’ explains Bieber.
“I think I just really looked at what life was like for people. And I think between the darkness and the light is dealing with the psychological effects of what happened to people because of Apartheid, because of what they witnessed. … I’m moving now to, say, my book about Soweto … It’s much lighter. And that’s very much where I am psychologically.”
This is the second in a series of interviews with South African photographers about photography and democracy in South Africa – then and now.
A full, wide-screen version of the videos are located here.
If the video loads slowly, or ‘hangs,’ you could click the HD symbol in the play bar and change it to SD.
You can read more about the project here. To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
The first video published on PhotographyAndDemocracy.com is an interview with South African photographer Cedric Nunn who describes how he became a photographer to engage politically in the struggle against Apartheid. Nunn will be followed by many other interesting South African photographers. Already on the reel, and showing soon, are interviews with photographers Jodi Bieber and David Goldblatt.
A full, wide-screen version of the videos are located here.
If the video loads slowly, or ‘hangs,’ you could click the HD symbol in the play bar and change it to SD.
You can read more about the project here. To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
To get notified when new interviews are added, sign up for email updates.
PhotographyAndDemocracy.com is a new website hosting a video project about photography and democracy in South Africa. Here you can view a series of video interviews – to be published in succession – with South African photographers. They tell us about some of their work and share their thoughts about South Africa, then and now.
Made with South African photo students in mind, the interviews are a little longer than one would normally see on the TV news or information-age web publications. I wanted to try to capture and share the experience of listening to a mentor.
A photographer myself and sometimes a guest lecturer in photojournalism here in South Africa, I often wished I had more materials with which to prepare my lectures – especially when it comes to events here in South Africa. I like showing examples throughout history during which photographic documentation of events played a big role in protecting human rights and upholding democratic values.
There are few places where photography played as big of a role in shaping a democracy as it did here in South Africa. Photographers risked their lives to show the outside world what life was like under Apartheid, and to document the struggle against it.
Although a wealth of books and films has already been produced, these resources are not always accessible to everyone. So I thought this website might be useful to other tutors, students and photo enthusiasts in general. Fortunately many of the photographers I ask for an interview agree to participate. And luckily, the Open Society Foundation For South Africa thought it was a good idea too, and decided to sponsor the project.
Over time, I hope the PhotographyAndDemocracy.com series of video interviews will provoke interesting discussions about photography and South Africa’s democracy – in its current state, and for the future.
See you here!
Eva-Lotta Jansson