For forty years I have worked on highly personal photographic essays reflecting my response to South Africa’s complex evolution. During the eighties I produced numerous essays documenting life under apartheid and eventually joined the collective, Afrapix. Between 1989 and 1994 I covered South Africa’s transition to democracy for Reuters and other news organisations. Since then, I have concentrated on producing contemporary bodies of work that reflect this complex country.
My work is housed in many permanent collections, including The Centre Pompidou (France), The Smithsonian (USA), The Rotterdam Museum of Ethnology, Duke University (USA), The North Carolina Museum of Art, The St Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts (USA) and Finnish School of Photography (Finland).
I have staged solo exhibitions in Johannesburg, New York, Paris and London and have contributed to many combined exhibitions including the 2011 Figures and Fictions exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
During 2013 I was awarded the POPCAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography as well as the Ernest Cole Book award for the series, A city refracted. In 2014 a selection of images from the series, Over Time, was included in a major exhibition showcasing South African photography at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. In 2014 a set of images from the series A city refracted was included in the Aperture Summer Open exhibition in New York. In April, 2017 images from the series, As the grass grows, were included in the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s Being There, a collective exhibition showcasing contemporary South African art. In 2008, as Barack Obama sought Presidency and raced for the position against John McCain, Newsweek magazine ran a story asking each candidate to choose an image that best personified their world view. Obama’s team chose a township image that I took in 1991.
Photographic assignments have taken me to fifty countries and my photographs have been published in major publications worldwide, including National Geographic Magazine, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and Photography magazine (UK).
