Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson was born in 1941 in Litchfield, England. In 1948, she moved with her family to Cape Town, South Africa. In 1963, she followed a 2-year program at the Art Students League of New York, specializing in printmaking as well as photography, video, and installation. Williamson is part of the pioneer photographers who started documenting the social change in what was then apartheid in South Africa. In 1983, she began a 5-year project consisting on a series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle. In the 1990s, Williamson worked on several projects reflecting on the history of her country including Mementos of District Six (1993), Out of the Ashes (1994), and RIP Annie Silinga (1995). She later considered working on global social issues by undertaking art projects around the world. Williamson has also written several books on contemporary art including Resistance Art in South Africa (1989), Art in South Africa (1996), and South African Art Now (2009). She is the founding editor of ArtThrob, a prominent webzine that features the work of contemporary South African artists.

Jo Ractliffe

Jo Ractliffe was born in 1961 in Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town after completing two degrees. Ractliffe uses a variety of art practices including photography, video, and mixed media installations. She reflects on the South African landscape and the ways in which if figures in the country’s imaginary. Ractliffe mainly uses landscape photography to capture struggle, violence, and war. Her major work depicts the aftermath of the Angolan Civil War, a conflict in which South Africa was intricately involved, in a series of three projects: Terreno Ocupado (2008),  As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010), and The Borderlands (2013). Her images represent the desolation of places which have been fought over, occupied, and left. They also depict the impact of the war in and outside South Africa. Ractliffe also conducts lectures, workshops, and courses at several institutions in South Africa including the Market Photo Workshop. She has initiated and participated in various independent projects such as PhotoFocus – a pedagogy platform for taking photography education across disciplines, histories, spaces, and experiences.

Tracey Derrick

Tracey Derrick was born in 1961 in Kesteven, England and immigrated with her family to Cape Town, South Africa. Upon graduating from the University of Cape Town, Derrick moved to New York where she trained in photographic printing in the School of Visual Arts in 1989. Two years later, she moved back to Cape Town and started a career as a portrait and documentary photographer focusing primarily on social and community issues. Her early work was related to the political transition in South Africa with projects such as Side by Side (1994) in which she documented the role of women in the first democratic elections. Derrick also explored the lifestyle of several groups of people including the Himba people in Namibia, the sex workers of Cape Town, the farm labourers of Swartland, and the women inmates of Malmesbury prison. In parallel, she continued to manage photography workshops, sometimes teaching her subjects to take their own photographs and share their stories with the public. In 2008, Derrick was diagnosed with breast cancer and has documented this experience in the project One in Nine (2010), for the first time becoming the subject of her own work.

Graeme Williams

Graeme Williams was born in 1961 in Cape Town, South Africa. After completing his studies in Geology, he started to work as a photographer by capturing houses for the real-estate section of a local newspaper. In 1989, Williams moved to Johannesburg where he worked as a freelance photographer. He covered the violence that marked the collapse of apartheid and the country’s transition to democracy for Reuters. In 1991, Williams joined Afrapix, a photographers’ collective that aimed to expose the truth despite censorship during apartheid. He later cofounded and managed a photograph agency with other members of Afrapix. In 1994, he stopped making news photography to gradually focus his work on both commissioned and personal projects locally and abroad. Williams’ photography has been exhibited in several locations worldwide, and is held in various permanent collections. Some photographs have been published in books including The Floor (1996) which documents the last year of open outcry trading on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and The Inner City (2000) which explores social isolation as Johannesburg struggled to adjust to political changes.