The Market Photo Workshop in association with AngloGold Ashanti is pleased to announce Jerry Obakeng Gaegane as the recipient of the 2012/13 Edward Ruiz Mentorship.
The mentorship is set out as a developmental mentorship, aimed at assisting an emerging photographer. The recipient has the opportunity to work closely with a suitable mentor, who will provide guidance and direction on the intended project.
About Jerry Obakeng Gaegane
Jerry Obakeng Gaegane was born and raised in Meadowlands, Soweto, Johannesburg. Gaegane completed a course in Graphic Design at Rosebank College in 2008. It was during this course that he felt a definite connection with the medium of analogue photography, and subsequently enrolled at the Market Photo Workshop to study the Foundation, Intermediate courses as well as the Advanced Programme in Photography (APP) in 2011.
During the APP, Gaegane’s work primarily focused on documentary narratives. His body of work Collectors (2011) documented a group of people living in the township of Soweto who distribute coal and collect steel and metal waste in the neighbourhood. Gaegane also participated in the Market Photo Workshop’s photo-documentary project about Makweteng, a historical township in Potchefstroom, North West Province. The project aimed to reconstruct and conserve the history and heritage of Makweteng. Gaegane’s photo-narrative for the Makweteng Project, explores hostels in Ikageng, Potchefstroom (Tlokwe), North West Province and how families make these spaces habitable and homely. The title of Gaegane’s project, Tsena, is derived from the Tswana word meaning ‘come in’, meaning to enter into spaces, conveys the artist’s intention to document how people come to make home in strange and difficult spaces. Tsena (2012) has been exhibited as part of Tracing Territories, an outdoor exhibition around Tlokwe and then exhibited at the Market Photo Workshop Gallery in early 2012. Gaegane is currently participating in the Market Photo Workshop’s Joburg-Photo-Harare Masterclass.
Gaegane’s proposed work for the Edward Ruiz Mentorship seeks to develop Tsena, the body of work he did as part of the heritage and history project about Makweteng (a historical township in Potchefstroom, North West Province). His project seeks to explore individuals who engage in gold surface mining in Johannesburg in relation to workers employed by large scale mining companies in the North West Province.
Gaegane will also produce an accompanying audio to give miners a voice, while he explores their spaces as a concept of strangeness, discomfort, claustrophobia, work but also of home, habitability and friendship.
About the Market Photo Workshop
For over twenty years, the Market Photo Workshop has played a pivotal role in the training of South Africa’s photographers, ensuring that visual literacy reaches neglected and marginalized parts of our society. Since it was founded in 1989, by world-renowned photographer David Goldblatt, the Photo Workshop has been an agent of change and representation, informing photographers, visual artists, educators, students and broader communities of trends, issues, and debates in photography and visual culture.
The Market Photo Workshop also runs a number of Public Programmes, which are a series of events involving and directed at professional photographers, visual artists, educators, students as well as the broader public. These Public Programmes seek to inform the trends, practices, methods, and contemporary ways of working and thinking in South African photography practice through exposure to a broad understanding of visual culture as well as a networking platform that encourages critical thinking and engagements.
Showcasing a number of high profile local and international photographers, as well as student and alumni photography work, the Market Photo Workshop has been able to build a strong and consistent audience base around our gallery, ‘The Photo Workshop Gallery’ in Newtown, which is on the same premises as the school. Since 2005, when the gallery was initially launched, the kind of platform it has engendered encourages not only emerging students to experience and enter into professional practice, but has distilled a new type of photographic practice amongst the greater artistic community. Various critical discourses, especially around the role documentary photography, have been stimulated by the multitude of exhibitions that
have shown at The Photo Workshop Gallery creating dynamic interactions between students and the greater photography community.
For information about the Edward Ruiz Mentorship please click here, or contact:
Bekie Ntini
Coordinator: Mentorships and Training
T +27 (0) 11 834 1444
E-mail: bekien@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
Market Photo Workshop
2 President Street (entrance Bus Factory)
Newtown
Johannesburg
info@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za
The Market Photo Workshop is a division of The Market Theatre Foundation.
