We meet on Constitution Hill, in Johannesburg, the site of the jail where South Africa’s liberation leaders were detained. De Vlieg was once detained nearby herself, at the Hillbrow police station. Today, the photographer’s work is housed here by the South African History Archive, SAHA.

“I was never really someone who went onto the front lines in a way that, for instance, the members of the Bang Bang Club did. My approach was very much to integrate myself so that I could see from behind the lines more, and really what lead people to become activists themselves; And why was it that these young people wanted to be fighting for certain rights? You know, what took them onto the streets; Why were they able to feel that they needed to confront the police, for instance, and to change South Africa?” de Vlieg says in the video on photographyanddemocracy.com

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You can view more of Gille de Vlieg’s pictures on SAHA’s website or Africa Media Online.

Weinberg who was the official photographer for the 1994 elections that saw Nelson Mandela voting for the first time tells me about his depression that ensued when freedom arrived and his resulting body of work – Moving Spirit.

“I started the project Moving Spirit just after 1994, our euphoric moment when we had found peace and there was freedom and democracy was in place. I found myself in a dark place. I encountered what the psychiatrist said was my third phase of depression. … It forced me to look at my own healing … I also used the camera to look at the healing that was going on in the country,” Weinberg says in the video interview.

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“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.

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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.

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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 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

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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.

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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.

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.