Who…
I’m from Jo’burg and when I finished studying at Wits I joined a film production company and we made kwaito music videos for artists like the Trompies, BOP and Mandoza. On the side I would video and photograph my friends who were MC’s, rappers and poets in JHB’s emerging hip hop scene. In the early noughties I made friends with Benjamin, a bar man who had the seemingly farfetched idea of going to Sudan as a journalist and covering the genocide there, which at that stage hadn’t been reported at all in the media. To me these were just the delusions of a bored cocktail mixer. But a month later I got a call from him, on a satellite phone in the middle of the blazing hot Sudanese desert. Benjamin wanted me to meet him in Ethiopia a few days later to photograph a story for a British newspaper about a forced resettlement program that was causing a famine. I had done the Intermediate Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg and had been photographing my friends quite a bit but I had never worked as a professional photographer but I wasn’t about to say no to the opportunity! So armed with just an old Pentax K1000 camera from the 1970’s that my sister had given me years before, I jumped on a flight to Ethiopia and began my career as a photojournalist.
Benjamin Joffe-Walt and myself spent the next three years chasing stories around the African continent and the world, from the Congo to Sudan and Somalia, from China to the Maldives. I eventually grew a bit disillusioned by the world of journalism so I decided to give it a break for a while and in 2007 I went to New York to study documentary photography at the International Center of Photography. I now live in Cape Town and work as a freelance photographer.
Work…
For a living, I take photo’s for newspapers, magazines, NGO’s and other organizations. I also photo edit an alternative political
magazine called Amandla!. On the side I adventure around the city and country with my camera finding beautiful, strange, interesting, profound, unjust, inspiring or revolutionary things to photograph.
Learning…
I grew up in Jo’burg with parents who where very involved in politics and the liberation struggle. They were both explorers and documenters of society with the idea of being part of the bigger force that would help liberate the country from apartheid. My mum, Luli Callinicos, is a writer and historian and she wrote three quite subversive history books in the 1980’s that told the story of the history of ordinary South Africans rather than the ‘great men’ that supposedly shaped history, a history that was kept muted and silent during that Apartheid era. Her books where full of images and photographs of migrant workers coming to the city to work in the mines, of crowded compounds and overworked and exploited miners, of domestic workers in the city and women working the farms, of rand lords and their opulent homes in the luscious green suburbs of Jo’burg. I would spend hours looking through her photos, imagining that world, the story of my city and my country. My dad, Eddie Webster, on the other hand is a passionate industrial sociologist and constantly explores and burrows into the structure of things, and the nature of work and the lives of workers, trying to find a way to make it all work better, in a more just and fair way. They both gave me my conscience and my desire to explore the world around me.
Then vs now…
I think I spent the majority of my childhood in a swimming pool, a kingdom I ruled benevolently as the queen of the underwater. But when I was forced onto land I was bit of a quiet kid, watching and observing the land folk with their strange ways, molding forests and magical lands out of my parents world of politics. But when I was about 14 I started to get restless with the confines of being a child, feeling the excitement of the streets. I started sneaking out of the house in the dead of night and running off into the dark strange exciting world of adultness at the nearby Rockey Street in Yeoville.
It was the mid 90’s and South Africa was in the full throttle of change. The country was ripping off its lizardish Apartheid skin and embracing this new strange creature called freedom. Yeoville was in the center of this change. The streets where frequented by artists and musicians and outcasts and bikers and political activists and drug dealers and chance takers. The nights were exciting and scarey and beautiful and I was as addicted to them as I am today to the adventures that documentary photography offers.
Confidence…
I don’t think I ever gave it any thought – whether I’d be good at it, I just did it because I loved it.
Right now…
I’m trying to photograph my childhood in Hogsback. It’s a really beautiful mist forest in the Amatole mountains and my family have a place there so I spent many holidays lost in the forests.
Pros and cons…
I think a camera is a bit like having a magical key that gets you into new and interesting places that you would normally never be able to go. It has allowed me into strangers homes, into rooms as babies are being born, onto military helicopters over Darfur and army caspers in the Congo, into stinking trash depots in New York and backstage of world cup qualifier soccer matches. I dislike that sometimes photographs separate me from people and that sometimes I can forget my own humanity for the sake of the image.
Environment…
I grew up in Johannesburg to very political parents at time when the country was transforming from an Apartheid state into a new democracy. The family’s life and outings were all centered around this. When the ANC was unbanned, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and change started in the country. I remember very vividly looking at the bloody and disturbing images in the newspapers and on TV of the townships in flames and on the verge of civil war, images of the old guard crumbling under the anger and determination of millions of people, of mass celebration, liberation, joy and transformation. Through these images of my own society I came to understand that photography is not only a documenter of the times and keeper of history, but a commentator and a tool for change, an instigator, even an agitator. And at the same time I felt that as a person living in an unjust, unequal society I had no choice but to in some way help to change that. Though I don’t have any illusions that photography can save the world, I think it can contribute to helping open our eyes, our minds and our hearts.
Encouragement…
Yes, lots from my friends and family and inspiration too.
Family…
Besides my parents, the other influence in my life from my family was my older brother, Kimon. He is a very talented musician and had a kwaito band called Jacknife in the early 90s when I was still in high school. They became a huge radio hit at the time. The band would practise in his bedroom studio at my parent’s house. I desperately wanted to be part of it all and all the fun in his studio but being the much younger sister I would always eventually get kicked out. So I started to master the art of quietly observing them, sitting in the room listening to their stories of their adventures in clubs, the country’s politics, the snakes in the music industry and their relationships. I loved being the undetected observer in a world I wasn’t meant to see.
Best advice…
David Goldblatt, the legendary South African photographer, once said that you should always carry a miniature telescope in your pocket so you always have a vast and wide sense of the space you occupy and a broad perspective.
Collections…
I have very recently become a map collector in the hopes that I can manifest a journey by putting a map of the destination on the wall of my studio. Right now I have Mexico City and New York, I’m hoping to get my hands on a map of the little Greek island of Ithaca that my mother’s family come from.
Inspiration…
When I’m lost and shy and uninspired I try to spend some time doing backflips and handstands in the pool and hanging out under water in the quiet blue stillness.
A few of her favourite things…
Strange flowers, my studio at the Woodstock Industrial Center, the forests of Hogsback and watching birds fly…
To relax…
I take photo’s of pretty things.
People…
All of my friends inspire me a lot. My grandmother who recently passed away was an incredible woman with a huge heart and lots of fire in her and was a big influence and inspiration.
Plans…
I have plans to shout some thoughts, quite loudly, onto walls on the streets of Cape Town. Then I’m running off to the North into the summer to hang out with some Greek villagers and monks on the island of my ancestors and take photos of goats and gods.
Advice…
In world so polluted with images, photography can only really be a personal journey.