Between the cracks: Paul Weinberg's photographic journey through struggle and humanity in South Africa

Sunset, //Aqri≠ah, Namibia, 1986.

13 May 2025

For decades, the photographer has documented lives that are often overlooked, finding moments of humanity and resilience amid apartheid’s shadows. His retrospective exhibition opens soon.

Between the Cracks brings together nearly five decades of Paul Weinberg’s photographic career. During this period, he has produced 21 books, either as a photographer or as both author and photographer. He has also contributed to important collective projects, exhibitions and publications.

Weinberg was a founding member of Afrapix and South, two collective agencies that gained local and international recognition for their uncompromising role in documenting apartheid and the popular resistance against it.

In his early career as a photojournalist, Weinberg worked on the “front line” of history, capturing pivotal moments in South Africa’s Struggle.

Read more: A ‘beautiful, imperfect journey’ — a photographer recalls the ‘near miracle’ of SA’s 1994 election

However, as he notes, the concept of the “front line” evolved throughout his career. “Those of us who actively documented the unfolding events and the deeper fabric of our society in the ’80s often referred to ourselves as the ‘Taking Sides’ generation.

“As I came to understand it, the ‘front line’ was not always just the obvious news story of the time. There were other ways to reflect what was going on — through metaphors and symbols of the human struggle.”

Throughout his career, Weinberg has sought to go beyond the headlines, engaging in in-depth storytelling. His work has taken him on extensive journeys, from urban landscapes to remote rural settings and everything in between.

A white child plays with an Indian child during the forced removals in Fietas, Johannesburg, 1982. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

Labour tenant addresses farmers at a meeting about evictions from farms, Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal, 1995. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

Zion Church baptism, Nyaka Island, Mozambique, 1999. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

George Champion ploughs his land after the Mfengu communities’ return, Tsitsikamma, 1995. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

Alcohol bought with army wages, Tsumkwe, Namibia, 1984. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

Sunset, //Aqri≠ah, Namibia, 1986. (Photo: Paul Weinberg)

Weinberg’s projects explore a wide range of themes, including the lives of the San, issues of land, the fisherfolk of Kosi Bay and spirituality. At times, he has also turned the camera on himself, producing deeply personal projects such as Going Home (a collaboration with Santu Mofokeng that examined their respective hometowns), and Dear Edward, which traces his own family roots.

Tamar Garb, in her foreword to Between the Cracks, writes: “At the heart of Weinberg’s project is the body and consciousness of the photographer, whose presence is everywhere felt. Not only does he wield the camera, but he also continuously questions his relationship to his subjects.

“This self-reflective journey as a research-led image-maker is particularly evident in his early work exploring the visual anthropology of southern Africa’s first people. Deeply opposed to their exoticisation and commodification, Weinberg is committed to both the politics and poetics of their existence. For him, the dispossession of the ‘Bushmen’ is inseparable from their reification as objects of tourist curiosity or cinematic idealisation.”

In his accompanying essay, Jacob Dlamini describes Between the Cracks as “...this marvellous retrospective of one of the most influential careers in modern photography. It helps us see how the shadow of apartheid fell across South Africa and the region.

“More than that, the photographs in this collection capture brilliantly what Deborah Posel called the ‘racial common sense’ — a defining feature of life under apartheid.”

For Weinberg, Between the Cracks is grounded in the lives of ordinary people, often in the most difficult of times, under the constraints of racism and apartheid.

Photography, for him, became both a form of resistance and a means of survival. As he writes: “Photography became an integral part of how I saw the world; it gave me a passport to travel across the divides that were so prevalent at the time. I embarked on all sorts of journeys off the beaten track.

“But it was the people I was looking at — the way they reflected themselves, how I absorbed their reflections, how they danced with reality, how they found light in the darkness, and how they embraced each other, even at great risk.” DM

Paul Weinberg: Between the Cracks, is a career retrospective exhibition opening at the Wits Art Museum (WAM, corner Jorissen and Bertha streets, Braamfontein, Johannesburg) on Tuesday, 13 May 2025 at 6pm. Weinberg will conduct a public walkabout of the exhibition on Saturday, 17 May at noon. The accompanying book will have its Johannesburg launch at Love Books (53 Rustenburg Road, Melville) on Wednesday, 14 May at 6pm.

Paul Weinberg is represented by Peffers Fine Art.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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