Storyteller par excellence through a camera lens

TALI FEINBERG

PHOTOGRAPH: PAUL WEINBERG

“I am passionate about storytelling through the camera. Sometimes photography is not enough. Exhibitions today are all about multimedia and creating layers of interest. From very early on in my career I began working in this way,” says Weinberg.

He combined photography and activism during apartheid, founding the agencies Afrapix and South, which gained international recognition for their uncompromising role in documenting apartheid and resistance to it.

“Our main aim was to provide an alternative archive that was accessible to the left and the anti-apartheid movement,” explains Weinberg. “Many of us were doing long-term projects that looked beyond the narrow political frame of the time. I began my work on the San, (people) for example, in 1984. So, many of us were engaged in open-ended work that spoke to the issues in a more nuanced way.”

Weinberg has also delved into his Jewish roots both in South Africa and Eastern Europe. The exhibition and book Dear Edward (exhibited at the South African Jewish Museum in 2013), “was about turning the camera on myself and my family’s history, inspired by my great-grandfather Edward,” he explains.

“The book explores my past as I retrace my family’s footprints in South Africa. It took me to far-flung small towns in the interior, where the family found a niche in the hotel trade. In the form of postcards to my great-grandfather Edward, it is on one hand a visual narrative of this journey and on another, a multi-layered travel book, as I pieced the jigsaw of my family’s past together.”

Weaving history, historiographies, memoir and archive into a personal pilgrimage, Dear Edward offers insights and perspectives into a family who made this country their “adopted home”. 

Explains Weinberg: “The metaphor of the postcard sets up a dialogue between me, my great-grandfather, the past and the present, and asks important questions about who writes history and who is left out.”

Much of Weinberg’s work has been with indigenous people and he has lived and worked with them often for months at a time. “I have lived a lot of my life in the bush. My most enduring project has been with the San, which has continued for 30 years. I work against the commercialised image of the San – often presented as ‘a group of people who lived romantically as hunter gatherers in the Kalahari as if time stood still.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Weinberg has just completed an exhibition about his 30-year journey with the San called Traces and Tracks. “It is currently showing at the !Khwa ttu gallery near Cape Town and it will move to the Origins Centre at Wits later this year, with some international venues after that. I am completing it as a book which I hope to publish before the end of 2016.” He currently works as a curator at the Centre of African Studies Gallery at UCT.

Weinberg has invested in young photographers by creating the Ernest Cole Photographic Award, “a project that David Goldblatt and I established to support creative photographic work in South Africa with an emphasis on human rights and social change”.

The award allows for a long-term project to be made into a book. “It is in honour and in the spirit of Ernest Cole, who documented black life under apartheid in the mid-1960s.” It was awarded to Dale Yudelman in 2011 and Ilan Godfrey in 2012.

Weinberg’s advice to aspiring young photographers is to “follow your heart and ask hard questions. It is both of these pursuits that will define your journey. Most of my journeys started off with a question.”

* For more information visit www.ernestcoleaward.uct.ac.za and www.paulweinberg.co.za