David Southwood

When I first arrived in Cape Town I attended a couple of public photo crit sessions during which the art component and the documentary component panned each other with tomatoes. The artists clutched their heads and used phrases like ‘I-den/tity’(’90s) and the documentary photographers used phrases like ‘bear witness’ while scrunching up their bad taste windbreakers with the a clenched fist in the heart region. The NOOR agency are running a masterclass-apply here- in Cape Town soon. NOOR is a famous photo agency who supply many publications with content which is generated by the ‘documentary’ photographic method. If they don’t pack out their class with their kind I am sure that the same sorts of two-bit fight will be had again. Of course if the NOOR photographerssat around in regions of ‘civil and political unrest, environmental issues, war, famine, and natural disasters’ and discussed, at length, the implications of new technologies on their trade it wouldn’t work, but it is surprising that their manifesto doesn’t mention this at all. It will be interesting to see if they do engage with the more abstract components of news making and photography like the way in which the stories are presented and who reads them. I made this photograph on the Cape Flats in 1998. The entire family was inebriated and the medic is checking to see if the stab wound has penetrated through to the lung of the stabbed. It was made in a time when I privileged form and the instant over most other things.