Alexia Webster
Alexia Webster was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. After graduating from Wits University, Alexia saw photography as a powerful tool through which one can explore and agitate and began working as a freelance photographer for numerous magazines and newspapers.
In this interview she told us how her photography was influenced by her mother’s books, the first professional work she did and the idea and the process behind her series “Street Portraits- A South African Family Album” which is to be presented at Goa Photo.
[GOA PHOTO] How did you start in photography?
[ALEXIA] My mom, Luli Callinicos, is a writer and historian and she wrote three quite subversive South African history books in the 1980’s, during apartheid, that told the story of ordinary South Africans rather than the ‘great men’ that supposedly shaped history. It was a history that was kept muted and silent during that Apartheid era. Her books where full of images and photographs of migrant workers coming to the city to work in the mines, of crowded compounds and overworked miners, of domestic workers in the city, of rand lords and their opulent homes in the suburbs of Johannesburg. As a little girl, I would spend hours looking through her vast collection of photos, imagining that world, piecing together the story of my city and my country. When I turned 16 she bought me a camera and I began piecing together the world with my own images.
[GOA PHOTO] Can you tell us a little bit of your career in photography
[ALEXIA] Ever since I picked up a camera at 16, I had been playing with photography. I photographed my friends, our adventures and generally just explored the world around me. When I finished my BA at university, I started working in a production company that made music videos. Then one day I got a very unexpected call from a journalist friend of mine to go join him as the photographer on a story he was doing in Ethiopia for a big British newspaper. So, having had no experience at all as a working photographer, I packed my bags and my little camera and headed off on my first ever assignment. The newspaper really liked the work we produced and so my career as a photographer began.
[GOA PHOTO] In your bio, it’s said that you “explore both the visible and the invisible with your camera”. What does it means for you?
[ALEXIA] Photography, like any art form, represents not just the world around us, but also the world inside us, the world we dream and imagine, the world we hope for and fear. The camera allows me to explore and investigate those invisible, indefinable worlds.
[GOA PHOTO] What kind of photography you do? Can you define it?
[ALEXIA] I have many ways of working as a photographer. I have used all these methods -documentary, portraits, fine art- at some point in my work. Each project I do requires its own approach, its own method of exploring.
[GOA PHOTO] About the work “Street Portraits- A South African Family Album ” how did you get this idea, and how was the photographic process?
All the years I was growing up, hanging in the hallway of my childhood home was an old black and white photograph of my grandparents and my mother as a toddler, posing in a photographer’s studio in Johannesburg. They were recent immigrants to South Africa from a tiny village in Greece. I would stare for hours at my grandparents, looking young and proud, dressed in their finest; at my two-year old mother with specially curled hair; at the studio-painted backdrop of a misty romantic world. That photograph seemed to be a link to the far away world of my ancestors in Greece, to my history and identity. To this day, of all the images I have, it is one of my most treasured.
After a few years of working as a photojournalist though I began to struggle more and more with the actual value and importance of the photographs I was taking for the people in the images. So I created the first ‘Street Studios’. They are public outdoor photographic studios set up on street corners which invite passing families, individuals or groups of friends to pose and get their photo taken. The photograph is printed there with a portable photo printer so you can take it home with you for your family album.
[GOA PHOTO] The theme of Goa Photo’s first edition is “The Other”, so can you tell us how is “the other” present in the series you are going to present there?
[ALEXIA] I don’t think the work is about ‘The Other’ at all, in fact the project is born out of a direct desire to challenge the idea of the Other. This project is looking to create family photographs for people of all walks of life and backgrounds, in South Africa but also around the world, with the objective of one creating a large human family album.
[GOA PHOTO] As an artist, beyond the role of promoting photographers works, what do you think is the importance of a festival, and what can it do for photography?
[ALEXIA] Photo festivals have the potential to open up conversations about photography, both between the invited photographers, but also with the general public, taking photography out of the often elite galleries and magazines and onto the streets and public spaces where it can be debated, critiqued, question or appreciated.
[GOA PHOTO] You are planning to set up a traveling studio on the streets of Goa. It will be the first time you take the project out from Africa? If not where have you taken it?
[ALEXIA] In 2014 I started to travel with the project out of South Africa and we have set one up the studios in an IDP/refugee camp in Goma in the DR Congo, another two in Madagascar- one in a dusty rock quarry and another on the streets of Antananarivo- and then finally in a few public parks in Reunion Island.
[GOA PHOTO] Do you intend to continue traveling with the “studio”?
[ALEXIA] I’m hoping to set up the studio to other areas in India and will continue to take the project around the world whenever I can.
[GOA PHOTO] What are your expectations for the work in Goa?
[ALEXIA] I’m open to anything in Goa and don’t have many expectations yet, each place is unique in its people and the responses that the studio generates.
Originally published at goaphoto.tumblr.com.
