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Photography students record their journey during lockdown
by Softcopy
WAHEEDA PETERS
An image captured by storyteller Nhlakanipho Nkomo during the current lockdown period.
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With the current COVID -19 crisis, the Photography programme’s students and staff were requested to participate and showcase their photographic expertise and practice in a compulsory photography programme project brief – 21 DAYS ISOLATION.
The project, which began on 27 March 2020, had over 90 visual storytellers participating. The main aspect was for all storytellers to make one strong image per day which simply represented isolation in one’s personal space that one is bound, for the 21 days of the first lockdown.
One of the storytellers, second-year Photography student Wonderboy Maluleka, spoke of his journey of documentation through COVID-19. “The fact that this is something that we are not used to made it interesting for me. I think it is important that we document a rare moment or situation in our lives. My main focus is around recording how people react to this pandemic, how they go on a daily basis trying to get used to the situation. It’s also about me as a photography student, how do I react as a visual artist when I am limited in terms of creating photographs,” he said.
He added that it is important to capture the mood and emotions because this is like a documentary. “We will always go back to this and just see how everyone was about the situation. Also, the next generation would also know what happened in 2020,” he stressed.
For second-year Photography student Scelo Dlamini, most of his work does reflect that he comes from the rural backgrounds of Ladysmith. “The COVID-19 epidemic has been a life-changing challenge for all of us and across all spheres in societies we live in. With the modern 21st-century technology, we are enabled to share images across the world with a wider platform. It is also important to capture events as they happen as images can also serve as a reference and awareness,” he said.
All student storytellers had to assemble a collection of images at the end of lockdown, which will yield promising results as everyone has a story to tell, and everyone’s story is important.
