THE ROOM IS deeply silent, but robustly populated. All eyes are focused on the speaker, who is out of your line of sight. In this 1989 photograph of a trade union meeting at the University of Cape Town, photographer Omar Badsha (b. 1945) peers with a clean mix of empathy, objectivity and acuity into the hearts and faces of every person in this meeting that his lens embraces. The effect is overwhelming and utterly magnetic. This balance of wisdom, journalistic reflection, aesthetic brilliance... read more
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This blog frequently focuses on archives and artists working with photographic archives but… how do photographers look after their own archives? This question we have had in mind for a while will be explored in this new column. In this first installment, photographer and activist Omar Badsha (born in Durban in 1945) talks about his archive and revisits past experiences... read more
Seedtimes – the title of Omar Badsha’s photographic retrospective is drawn from a poem by Mafika Gwala written in the wake of the Soweto Uprising of 1976, a period when the cultural and political movement against apartheid really began to develop momentum in the townships of South Africa. A time when there would be ‘no more lullabies’ as Gwala put it. The germination of Badsha’s own practice, however, can be located a... read more