The OSF-SA Legal Empowerment Network Strategy Book Project at the Market Photo Workshop
The Market Photo Workshop is undertaking a project with OSF-SA towards the production of a book. The book will reflect upon the work undertaken by the OSF-SA Legal Empowerment Network Strategy (LENS) from 2016 – 2020.
Amidst grassroots organisations working towards a more just and more equal society through legal empowerment, grassroots organizing and social movement, the LENS Book Project seeks to use photography and text narratives for documentation and development: The book will draw attention to equal access to justice issues for communities, ensuring that the legal work in communities is documented and archived for future references and use.
The Market Photo Workshop is working with LENS grantee organisations to collate, curate and archive pieces of work, including photographs, texts, visual aids. The materials will be used as content for the ‘story book’ with narrative. This will also include the learnings from COVID-19 using an Access to Justice lens, depicting the practical experiences on the ground. The learnings will be shared with other OSF foundations and community justice services and the broader donor and NGO community. It will then lead to a shared platform of webinars. The book will preserve the work done by LENS since 2016 and also develop more critical questions about the impact of the grantees’ work and its place within the community justice services.
The Market Photo Workshop will include in the book some photographs from its students and alumni which intent to draw attention to the role photography plays in setting social justice agendas during these unprecedented times of the global health challenge of COVID-19. The new photography works are of social responsibility, activism and ethical investigation by emerging African photographers.
The final design of the book will consists of photo stories, including background of the photographs and projects they are derived from, and written reflection texts. The photographs and materials sourced for the project will be archived in line with the Market Photo Workshop archival strategy.
The design of the text, essays, the imaging sequence, and the look and feel of the book will be done by Market Photo Workshop’s team drawing from their decades experience of producing photo books.
About the Content Curator
Fulufhelo Mobadi
FULUFHELO MOBADI is a South African photographer and Curator born in Johannesburg, 1986. In 2012, she graduated from the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Programme at the Market Photo Workshop. Her photographic practice focuses on the day-to-day struggles of women within contemporary South Africa and the African continent more broadly. As a socially engaged photographer, she is motivated by making the unspoken and the hidden visible. In June 2016, Mobadi collaborated with the Zimbabwean photographer Kresiah Mkhwanzi on a project exploring issues of rape and the objectification of women’s bodies. The work produced was exhibited at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in the exhibition titled In my Private Moments.
She was selected as the winner of the ASEF Visual Arts Award 2017, a prize created by the philanthropic arts organisation Prospero World. This award supported a six-week Artist-in- Residency programme in Nairobi, Kenya. During her stay, she worked with an organization called Access AFYA, and ran photography workshops with young mothers in the informal settlements of Mukuru, Nairobi. During the course of the residency, Mobadi produced a new body of work titled In Between. She also organised and curated an exhibition titled To the Women I have Never Met which displayed the 400 works produced by the young mothers of Mukuru with disposable cameras. The residency was a turning point in understanding the possibilities of photography as an educational and community-building tool.
In December 2017, Mobadi was invited by Prospero World to travel to London to speak about the work completed in Mukuru, and debut her first solo exhibition titled In Between at a Private View in Mayfair.
2018 was a turning point for Fulufhelo’s artistic career. She was selected to curate for the RMB Talent Unlocked Program which is an artist career development program by Assemblage, in collaboration with VANSA and Turbine Art Fair. The RMB Talent Unlocked Program has coordinated a six-month intensive workshop programme funded by RMB for emerging artists that integrates practical art-making (focusing on process and conceptual development) with professional practice training. The objective of this comprehensive programme is to provide the selected participants with support and guidance to develop their work and, very importantly, with tools to sustain their art career once the programme is completed.
In 2019, Fulufhelo worked as the Coordinator for Courses and Training at the Market Photo Workshop. In August 2019, at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, she was awarded the first curatorial research fellowship granted for African projects. Entitled “She Bad Bad”, her exhibition project investigates Southern African/ East African ideas around contemporary African photography in relation to documentary photography, seen through the works of African female photographers.
In 2020, Fulufhelo was named the second recipient of the ARAK Collection’s Curatorial Residency Fellowship
About the Designer
Dahlia Maubane
Dahlia Maubane (b.1988) is a photographer and multimedia designer. She completed a Bachelor of Technology in Multimedia at the University of Johannesburg in 2009. She went on to study at the Market Photo Workshop and has participated in numerous Market Photo Workshop projects and exhibitions. In 2014, her on-going body of work, Woza Sisi was one of the 10 open call projects during the Joburg Photo Umbrella. Maubane is the recipient of the inaugural Market Photo Workshop Alumnus Award. In September 2019, Maubane had her first international solo exhibition as part of the inaugural Dialogue Vintage Photography festival, in Amsterdam. She has been awarded the 2019/2020 Ampersand Foundation Fellowship and Residency in New York. Maubane is currently pursuing her Masters (Visual Arts) studies.
For more information, please contact:
Bekie Ntini
E-mail: bekien@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
Facebook: Market Photo Workshop
Instagram: @_marketphotoworkshop
Twitter: @_photoworkshop
Photoform Africa: www.photoformafrica.com
