Zambian-born John Robinson has
been focusing on the world through his camera lens as a social documentary
photographer for 18 years, picturing aspects of life in Sub-Saharan Africa. He
captures some of the ‘goings on’ of people in a series of portraits taken along
the South Beach beachfront of Durban. He documents his subjects against the ebb
and flow of the ever-changing sand and sea.
In this work he has gone back
to using black and white film, rather than digital. John takes photographs with
a small rangefinder camera instead of the larger DSLR camera. He feels that
this makes him, as a photographer, less ‘visible’ and keeps him more humanly
‘in touch’ with his subject. Photographing with an analogue camera he feels less
tethered to technology and more free to just take pictures of ‘what is’.
John Robinson is a social
documentary photographer and stroke survivor living in South Africa, these are
his own words and images.
South Beach is a part of
the City of Durban’s longest uninterrupted stretch of beach sand. The City of
Durban is on the eastern seaboard of South Africa and the people here are
washed with the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. To the north of this stretch of
sand are beaches with cafe society hang outs. To the south there is a pier with
the upmarket Moyo’s Restaurant at it’s end and the uShaka Marine World complex
and the private surf and sea clubs of the Vetches Beach area. Between these
northern and southern affluent areas lies this long uninterrupted and
relatively undeveloped stretch of beach sand. It’s along this beach that some
of the ‘scatterlings’ of Africa come to be alone, sleep, pray, walk, swim,
surf, work, commune with another, or just the sea sand and water.
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