“I seem to have an innate propensity which has been fed by life experiences and heightened by the kind of hyper-awareness that photography sometimes enables and demands…”
“My first awareness of a bodily particular that I can recall was of the bulges made by the flattened flesh of my inner thighs as I sat in shorts on a bench at kindergarten. From where I sat my bulges seemed more pronounced than anyone else’s and I tried to hide them with my hands. After a time I realized that my inner thighs were no different from others. But it remained an area of the body of which I was especially aware and which, in time in girls, came to have a strong attraction for me. I have never been able to decide whether my sense of people’s bodies is something I share with others or whether mine is different or perhaps more acute. Nor am I sure for how long I have had it. What I do know is that it has been with me for a very long time and that it is often intense and ‘detailed.’ I seem to have an innate propensity which has been fed by life experiences and heightened by the kind of hyper-awareness that photography sometimes enables and demands…
In 1975 after working for about five years on a series of portraits of my compatriots in the streets and homes of Soweto and the suburbs of Johannesburg, it seemed natural, almost inevitable, that I should extend what I was doing to an attempt to explore their bodies, or rather, the particulars of their bodies, as affirmations or embodiments of their selves.”