Photography and Democracy

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.