Photography and Democracy

Paul Weinberg is a documentary photographer and founding member of Afrapix, the photo collective that fought the Apartheid machine with their cameras. We meet at Weinberg’s office at the University of Cape Town, where he is the senior archivist for the visual archives. He is busy with an ambitious project preserving South African photography collections for future generations.

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.

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.