Join us and meet Cape Town based photographer Yasser Booley who is presenting his monograph South Africa at Liberty which was published by Africalia / Stichting Kunstboek. Yasser will be in conversation with his fellow photographer, Johannesburg born Gideon Mendel.
In South Africa at Liberty Yasser Booley sets out to capture the essence of the eclectic rainbow nation, post Apartheid era. Largely taken in the public space, his photos reveal sober and intimate moments of ordinary people, mainly living in the periphery, going about their ordinary lives.
Yasser highlights unusual stories, exposing everyday life of vulnerable and disadvantaged people, engaged in a basic struggle for survival on the city margins. His subjects – street children, factory workers, unemployed people, exhausted commuters crammed in trains and buses, protestors during political rallies, etc. – are real persons, devoid of artifice and theatrics, who have maintained a sense of dignity that not even the harshest circumstances could erode.
Yasser Booley started photographing the world around him in 1993 as 17 year old. He has since then worked as freelance photographer and for the production industry. In 2005, he was one of the founding members of a photographers collective Camissa1, consisting of 14 photographers from historically disadvantaged communities.
As a founding principle, this collective celebrated photography’s indispensable role in recording and presenting the various realities that exist in South Africa, and on the continent. Together, they put on an exhibition using various locations in Cape Town, giving birth to The Month of People’s Photography. The four following years, MOPP became a guerrilla fringe to MOP (South Africa’s annual October event Month of Photography), a deliberate signal to the establishment.
Yasser’s partner in conversation, Gideon Mendel, is an internationally established photographer. His intimate style of image making and long term commitment to projects has earned him international recognition. He has been awarded the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, six World Press Photo Awards, the POY Canon Photo Essayist Award, the Amnesty International Media Award for Photojournalism, and he was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Prize 2015 for his project Drowning World.
Free event, no Booking.