This is my personal journal of encounters with locations, people, food, animals and landscapes as a travel photographer.
A travel picture should have the spontaneity of a well seen snap shot.
I’ve had commissions to shoot travel stories for local and international clients such as Bon Appétit; Condé Nast Traveler; Die Zeit; ELLE à Table; French Elle; Food and Wine; Food Illustrated, House and Leisure, JAN The Journal; NRC; Sunday Times Lifestyle; Taste,;Visi, Wallpaper* and Zin.
Kuala Lumpur Dyed books for making fireworks, Vietnam Boy on turtle sculpture, Hue, Vietnam
Freedom statue, Maputo Boy and ball, Vilanculos, Mozambique
Fisherwoman, Costa do Sol
LM prawns, Costa do Sol, Maputo
CAPE TOWN MY CAPE TOWN!
The highlight of travelling is often the excitement of returning to your place of departure and as such, my first glimpse of Table Mountain through the plane’s porthole is always exhilarating and joyful. I love the mountain – it’s so perfectly sculpted from raw granite. For 2 years I lived in London but I felt there was something missing – I felt incomplete; and now I live under the mountain’s spell and I’m moved by its moods. In summer its deep-etched outline is often broken by a rolling southeasterly wind whipping a billowing cloud over Table Mountain like an unsteady tablecloth. For days on end, it can disappear in a grey winter mist, only to make a sudden vivid comeback when the sun bursts through the sky.
Cape Town | DELTA Airlines
Two Ocean’s Aquarium, V&A Waterfront,
Waterfront, Cape Town | DELTA Airlines
THE SWIM
The Cape Town environment enjoys two oceans: a cold west coast and a warm east coast sea. The Cape has rock pools for swimming and two impressive municipal pools: the Sea Point Pavilion and the Long Street Turkish Baths – a Victorian relic, complete with mikvah and masseurs.
Sea Point Swimming Pool | Wallpaper*
Self portrait at The Long Street Turkish Baths | Elle Decor
FOOD CAPITAL
In recent years, due to its world-class delis, markets and restaurants, Cape Town has become the food capital of Africa.
An integral part of the South African cuisine, Malay food was introduced in the early 18th century to the Cape by the Javanese slaves shipped here to work on the farms of the Dutch colonists. The spice route that the Dutch created to import spices from their eastern colonies is still thriving today. Situated in the Bo-Kaap, formerly known as the Malay Quarter of Cape Town, the spice shop Atlas Trading and the The vibrant Rose Corner Café meet the community’s culinary needs.
Anatoli Restaurant, Cape Town | Bon Appétit
Moerkoffie, Porter Market, Tokai
Fork Tapas, Long Street, Cape Town | Bon Appétit
Rose Corner Café, Bo-Kaap, Cape Town | Cape Town Food
Giovannis Deliworld | Cape Town Food
Trading, Cape Town | Elle Decor
Vegetable Biryani, Eastern Food Bazaar, Cape Town | Elle Decor
CHURCHAVEN
A freshly caught grilled haarder is the most delicious fish I have ever eaten. It’s the staple food of the lagooners, the fisher people who live in Churchhaven on the Langebaan lagoon in the West Coast National Park of South Africa.
Churchhaven became my second home from the mid 1980’s until 2010. I loved the drama of winter when a strip of pink flamingos seperated a saturated sky from the turquoise lagoon. Nowhere have I seen such a sudden and definite change between seasons: the rough Southeaster of late spring seems to drain the winter lush from the veld, leaving it dry and grey.
Ouma Ellen Barsby holds a plate of grilled haarders at Churchhaven
ruber, Langebaan lagoon, Churchaven
QUAGGA
In 1883, the quagga became extinct when a female died in the Natura Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam. The Quagga Project is an extinction reversal success story started in 1987 by zoologist Einhold Rau from The South African Museum after he discovered the very close relationship between the quagga and extant plains zebras. Through selective breeding, he managed to re-introduce the species to the wild. The name 'quagga' is a Khoikhoi word and is onomatopoeic being said to resemble the animal's call.
DODO
It is believed that a Dutch sailor ate the last dodo, a flightless bird, on the island of Mauritius in the century, making it the first recorded species that had been wiped out by humans.
The dodo has become part of our vocabulary. A friend once gave English lessons to children in Greece taught them the phrase, ‘as dead as a dodo’. A couple of days later, a tearful boy announced to “My grandmother is a dodo”.
East London, as the city’s name suggests, has a few remnants left of its colonial past. For example, Natural History Museum is situated on Oxford Street, the main road through this somewhat dowdy town, on South Africa’s east coast. The museum is a little quirky and stuffy, but it has a lot of mood. national treasure. Unfortunately it’s also vulnerable to crime. A couple of weeks prior to my visit meteorite collection, as well as some Ming crockery, was stolen during an early morning heist.
I meet the natural scientist Kevin Cole, known for his discoveries of fossil footprints, who is the custodian of one of the museum’s prized possessions, the world’s very last dodo egg – an object shrouded in mystery and controversy.
London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin commissioned me to photograph the an exhibition entitled DODO at the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City. The brief was simple: “Photograph egg on a white background” – historically, the first assignment given to a Bauhaus photographic student.
Cole tells me the story of the dodo egg over a coffee in the museum canteen. t In 1938, curator Dr Majorie Courtney-Latimer made the museum famous when she discovered the coelacanth, a fish presumed extinct for 70 million years. As a young museologist her great aunt Lavinia Bean, received it from her father, a collector of natural history specimens, gave her a dodo egg. A friend a sea captain who visited Mauritius, had accepted it to settle a debt. Courtney-Latimer exhibited museum, assuming that it was the last dodo egg.
Cole remembers her with great admiration and affection as his mentor and friend. It saddened him her death in 2004, a high court had to decide its fate, as her heirs tried to reclaim it. The court favour of the museum, thus extending its custody of the egg.
I mention to Cole a somewhat scathing article written for the New Scientist by a Scottish museum claiming that a bird the size of an ostrich rather than the much smaller dodo probably laid the simply shrugs his shoulders and announces that he will be conducting a DNA test on the egg quite once and for all solve the mystery of its authenticity.
I photograph the egg in the museum’s boardroom under the watchful gaze of Courtney-Latimer’s portrait. It’s always exciting seeing something new – man-made or natural – and was struck by its appearance, almost round and asymmetrical, with embedded lines criss-crossing the patinated surface. I knew I was photographing something special – the last remnants of an icon of extinction.
early 17th Greece and the class:
example, the dowdy old mood. It’s a its entire custodian in intrigue, the egg for “Photograph the student.
coelacanth, Bean, who had friend of his, exhibited it at the that after judged in museum curator, the egg. He quite soon, to Courtney-Latimer’s framed its unique patinated yellowy extinction.
ONE AND A HALF DAYS IN ACCRA
During a 2012 trip to Accra, the capital city of Ghana known as The Black Star of Africa, to photograph an international design workshop, I had a day and a half free to snap the people and their food.
On the left hand page is a statue of Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of an independent Ghana, in front of a Johnny Walker whisky ‘Keep Walking’ billboard.
FROM THE ARID KENYAN PLAINS BLOSSOMS A SECRET GARDEN OF DELIGHT
Maximum meaning, minimal means. This simple approach is the structure upon which Nani Croze’s Kitengela Glass Paradise was built.
Born in Germany, Nani’s family of artists encouraged her natural creative ability from the very beginning, but it was Africa and its wildlife that instilled in her a real passion. In the early seventies after living in the Serengeti studying elephants, Nani and her former husband, animal behaviourist Harvey Croze, moved to Kenya where she began to paint murals for extra income.
Two years later and newly single, Nani was left with a large plot of land she and Harvey had bought from a Masai chief. Intending to eventually build a house upon it, the two had done little to the land before parting, and all that stood upon it was huts and stables.
Undeterred, even with three young children, Nani had to make the most of her artistry to provide for her family in Kenya. Advised to learn a discipline more lucrative than painting, Nani travelled to London where she took a course in stained-glass production.
Returning to her African home, she discovered simply mastering the art of her new craft was not the only challenge she was to face. Early commissions in Nairobi were few and far between, and the glass, which was costly and imported, had to be transported over kilometres of make-shift road.
It was after she was bought her first kiln by her current partner Eric Krystall, that Nani’s rich imagination and resourceful business mind were brought to life. Making her own lead, Nani realized that by employing the foreman of a collapsed glass plant in the area she could recycle and create her own coloured material – diminishing costs by a considerable amount. Nani started producing new and beautiful work swiftly, and the orders began to come in.
As her work team and family grew, so did her surrounds. The empty Masai land became peppered with thatched rondavels – thick clay huts studded with sparkling stained glass windows and ornate door and window designs. Each hut follows another along a winding paved path through the dense trees and bush, here and there a shimmering hunk of glass and everywhere the glitter of crushed mosaics.
Her imagination and inspiration from the wildlife she so loves is evident in sculpture and murals – her braai, the jaws of a dragon, her pool filled with the humps of a mythical sea creature. Up above the hot African dirt, bridges and wrought iron staircases lead to stilted studies and breathtaking balconies. Concrete and brilliant slabs of glass create tunnels and arches overhead and brightly painted wooden doorways lead from one dream world garden to another.
Built initially for shade in the otherwise barren land, the haunting sculptures loom between working posts. The evidence of her humble beginnings are here, from designs made only from bottle caps and scrap metal lead one right up to the Florentine, delicate glassware housed inside the statues.
Nani still recycles every piece of material, even the tiniest of shards, from suncatchers to mosaics are finally melted into beads, that are produced at the factory run by Nani’s daughter Katrineka, a fine arts graduate from the USA. In every way they can, they focus on lowering energy consumption. Kitengela’s carbon footprint is minimal, its impact on its surrounds barely noted, save for its surreal appearance.
Now, a studio of 50 local people who sustain their extended families on their wages, Kitengela has become a hive of industry, specializing in stained glass, glass-blowing, dale de verre, fusing, slumping, mosaic, wrought iron, ferro-cement sculpture, pottery, woodwork and jewellery making. And of course in doing so, has created a community for skilled artisans, a refuge for those seeking apprenticeships and has provided a new way of life for many.
Even as the studio garners great interest both locally and abroad, the nature of the land and the reality of its position remains the same, particularly as Nani has bought a buffer zone of land around the glass paradise as a wildlife sanctuary. Kitengela remains a constant reminder of the wild, simple life, a mad jumble of dream, thought and imagination. Lions and leopards and pythons pose threats to the livestock the Crozes keep; children walk barefoot to the efficient bush school Nani has created; roads don’t exist and neither does running water and electricity. Yet, out here, in this cool, quiet garden sanctuary, none of the conveniences of reality seem to matter.
WILD LIFE
Wildlife photography is about patience, luck and chance. But luck’s number one!
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” are the words of the ledendary war photographer Roert Capa Sadly Capa was killed during the Spanish Civil War.
Lion – Panthera leo, Timbavati, Mpumalanga
TIMBAVATI
Located in the heart of the Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga Province, my friend Rob Louw’s game farm, Keer Keer, forms part of the Timbavati Game Reseve. It has the largest concentration of wildlife per sq. kilometer in the world. My reason for visiting Keer-Keer is simply to be there, i.e. to experience – not because but in spite of the animals – the air, the trees and the silence.
The most endangered animal in the world: shy pangolin at dawn – Pholidota, Timbavati
