How did you first decide to become a filmmaker, photographer?

I never really decided to become a filmmaker or photographer, I kind of fell into it by accident. My formal training is as a sculptor with a degree in Fine Art.  In the early 90s I was living in the former east side of Berlin, it was a period just after the wall had come down and there was a wonderful sense of creativity and chaos in the city. East Germans were very eager to get rid of their past at that moment in history and so threw away anything that was made in the East. The West German authorities were not any better and also very quickly closed down factories and got rid of anything from the former communist regime.

I found all sorts of equipment thrown out in dumpsters on the streets; a lomo stills camera, 8 and 16mm film cameras, old record players, tape recorders, film projectors, slide projectors - all in good German working order.

Friends of mine at that time would come together and collaborate on different projects, each person bringing in a different element and then throwing it into the mix to create a kind of synchronistic, creative, chaos. We called these events “alive electric environments’, which would take place in abandoned and unused buildings and sites. These experiments opened up the power of the electronic world to me. Sound and vision has an incredible capacity to mesmerise and seduce. I became hooked.

When I returned to South Africa after living in Berlin for 5 years, it made sense to put the media and technological skills I had learnt into highlighting social issues. I wanted to tell the stories of this place as well as pass on my skills to youth who had had no access to these sort of skills or technology. Together with my partner at the time, we started and organisation called “Other-Wise media”. Our first project was teaching audio recording and story telling skills to girls who had experienced life on the streets of Cape Town. They created informative radio programmes and a radio drama about their lives which were broadcast on community radio. My  interest has always been about giving a voice to those whose voices are absent in the media, and covering issues left out of mainstream media.

How did I get involved in the face the people project?

I was invited to contribute my skills to the project by Gabrielle Le Roux who conceived of the project and proposed it to Rita Edwards at the health department’s Social Capital Office as a way to popularise the concept of social capital. Gabrielle and myself have a long standing friendship and we have also been mutual admirers of each other’s work. We have collaborated on various different projects before this one, including a series of radio programmes called “Women stimulating changes in their communities and the world”, a documentary called “Who’s News?” which explored women’s opinions of their representation in the media, an award-winning documentary called “Doing it!” which explored HIV and sexuality with 4 young women and a project highlighting the exploitation of child domestic workers. We both have a passion for telling the stories and creating a space for those voices that don’t get heard in mainstream media.

What have I gained from the project

I have met twenty wonderful people who have given me much hope for the future of this place. These are people you don’t necessarily read or hear about but they are quietly and steadily building this country, making it a safer, healthier and more caring place to be.

I have gained a deeper sense of myself as a documentary photographer and learnt that images of kindness, caring and open-heartedness are particularly inspirational for me.

What is the project trying to achieve?

Firstly the project aims to honour community health workers who for years and years have tirelessly been building their communities with no resources of their own except a will to be of service and to make a difference. Most of these community workers are women, and it is often women who shoulder the burden of caring for the sick, the elderly, the needy and the children. Many of these people’s stories have not been told, sometimes even their own families don’t understand the full extent of their work and contribution to the community. They need to be publicly recognised and thanked.

The exhibition also aims to highlight the concept of social capital by profiling people whose lives are living proof of the concept, so the abstract is concretised through the lives and work of these extraordinary people.

The people we profile in the exhibition are role models and hopefully their wonderful example will inspire others to do the same in their communities. We have had people saying that with all their resources, they have been put to shame, when they encounter people doing so much with so little. We want to inspire youth to get involved in their communities too so that the sense of caring and networking and organising in communities can continue through the generations

With my photographs, I aimed to give a sense of the diversity of each community health workers work that they do, from fighting crime, to helping with disaster relief, caring for aids orphans, counselling rape victims, starting soup kitchens to planting vegetables and herb gardens. Sometimes it is one health worker driving all of these diverse projects in her community.

What was my photographic process?

I spent a day  with each of the nominees, from early in the morning to late afternoon, so I could get a sense of what a day in their lives was like. I was completely exhausted at the end of each day by the sheer energy and number of problems and people each nominee dealt with in the course of their day. I found them to be incredible problem solvers, they also have so much passion and dedication but most of all, love and compassion for other people. For each person I took many photographs. These very humble people were not used to having their own “paparazzi” (that was me) following them around and documenting their every move. Sometimes they would ask me, “Don’t you have enough pictures now?” As a photographer you know when there is the right kind of energy between yourself and the subject to create a great picture, for me I have to click or wait until I get that feeling. The feeling is hard to describe because you only really know you have had it after the fact. At the time is a sense of being at one with everything around you, yourself, the camera, the environment, the people - all that energy fuses together as a moment stretches out forever. For me its like I get a little taste of eternity and then next thing you are back in this time zone and the camera has jammed or run out of film, the sun has gone, people have moved on and you have to think rationally about your next decision again.

In my photographs I tried to capture that love and passion that each of these people have for their communities and the people living in them. I was looking for pictures that were interactive and that told stories, that expressed the enormously big hearts these community health workers have.

I travelled to all the different areas around Cape Town, with all of my equipment without one mishap. I felt incredibly safe in the company of each of the community health workers because they have each earned so much respect from people in their areas that in their presence that high regard gets transferred to you also and nobody would dare try anything.

I still use a film camera and I shot on black and white film, post processing the film I worked with them digitally to create the brown sepia effect which gives the pictures the warmth I wanted.