I must have been on Pinterest or Instagram, vacuously perusing a blur of images – when my mindless scrolling was abruptly interrupted with an image that stuck with me for months. An image of a fresh faced boy in a black netted singlet, gold chains and velvet black drawstring trousers, gently slouched to one side…
Fluidity is a cry of freedom, is the sum of different stories, dreams, longings and desires, it’s a river junction it’s about me, about you, about us. Here we merge, we are stronger, we are FLUIDITY. Fluidity creative team, 2021. “We are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of…
Before I wanted to be anything in this world I wanted to be a señora….orbiting the women in my family, in the kitchen, in the living room, by the dresser. Anywhere there was power to be brokered. Anywhere the world was broken open to be understood. Anywhere there were secrets to be harvested…anywhere where I…
Nuits Balnéaire’s visual response to the One-Fifth of the Earth’s Surface, a conversation between the Atlantic Ocean, Hakeem Adam & Maxwell Mutanda, is strongly inspired by the feminine energy of the Gulf of Guinea. With this work, the artist captures the feminine energy, force and mystery of the West African coastline of Grand-Bassam — where…
I’m really curious about the human experience, the human condition. I think there’s a vicarious aspect to my work. I’m generally not an expressive person and photography has become a medium to explore emotion, or things that are difficult to verbalise. Lately I’ve been feeling [that] everything is related and whether it’s still life, landscapes,…
I was born eThekwini (formerly Durban)*. Growing up ebhish’ laseThekwini**, summers were often the highlight of the year. My family and I would often drive to the beach in a car packed to the brim with camp chairs, cooler boxes and treats. As kids, we would sing gleefully, ‘eBhish’ Durban, ebhish’, bhish’, bhish’, Durban!’ This…
“Can the same instrument that has historically been used to enact and perpetuate violence against Black people, be reclaimed by Black people and used to undo the legacy of that violence?” Asks multidisciplinary artist Ranji Mangcu about the camera in her graduate project IQHINA. Born in Manhattan, New York, in 1998 to South African parents,…
On a pre-pandemic evening in 2019, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Dayyaan Waja through mutual friends. I remember the night vividly as a student wandering around west campus, with Dayyaan capturing moments of my friend group’s late-night adventures on camera. The videos and images he shot, I still regard today as one…
Grace De La Hunt is a Cape Town based analogue photographer whose jaw-dropping work I’ve kept a close eye on for years. De La Hunt is unlike most analogue photographers who, let’s not beat around the bush, seem to be popping up around every corner. See, her format of choice isn’t the usual 35mm, medium…
For all intents and purposes, the South African photography landscape can often come across as rather stale — with the almost overly sharp, clean-cut and airbrushed “international” editorial look akin to that of an Elle magazine — continuing to flood our social media timelines. One could argue that it simply comes down to creatives playing…
22 year old Ben Olive received a camera on his 21st birthday and has since then been capturing intimate moments on film. The Cape Town based analogue photographer focuses on conceptual portraiture but also works across different themes, creating an impressive portfolio that gives insight into Ben’s desire to test himself in everything he does….
“It is amazing, 30 years later, people going ‘oh you photographed legends.’ I guess I did, but they weren’t legends when I was taking pictures of them”. British documentary photographer, Janette Beckman, recalls thinking back to the first projects she was exposed to in New York during the rise of hip-hop and youth rebellion in…
