Helping the Healing

Physiotherapy in Grey’s Hospital, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

Photos, John Robinson.

Helping the Healing. The physiotherapy department of Grey’s Hospital plays a part of a multidisciplinary healthcare in the care of both hospitalised and outpatients in this health facility. Grey’s Hospital is is a public tertiary health facility of the South African department of health. The hospital serves the greater western area of the KwaZulu-Natal province on the eastern seaboard of South Africa.

Available for image use and publication via Zumapress.com

A Space That Was

Two Abattoir Road

Photos, John Robinson.

Two Abattoir Road is in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. It is like many places in this city, it has a past. When it was built it was a bus depot for the city’s segregated transport department. It was then a home for some of the city’s Aids affected and infected children. After that it was a private Christian school and safe space during the pandemic. It has been cleared out to make a place for the homeless people on the streets of the city of Pietermaritzburg. These pictures were taken during a two week period while the building was being cleared out for its new purpose.

Camera & Coffee Sessions, Small Cameras

SINDI ZILWA Photo John Robinson

When Any Camera Intrudes Into a Person’s Space that Person Becomes Normative or in Other Words, Adopts a Pose That They Feel Is the Right Way for Them to be Perceived

Order coffees.

Unless you take out your camera in front of an inanimate object or a person without any prior knowledge of cameras and photography there will be a change in your subject when they realize they are being photographed. The photographer has always hankered for invisibility.

When any camera intrudes into a person’s space that person becomes normative or in other words adopts a pose that they feel is the right way for them to be perceived by the photographer at hand. Big setups like those with a camera on a tripod and studio lights will give off a more formal feel from the subject while small cameras and less of a studio setup will give off a more informal feel from the subject at hand. In both situations, the intervention of more of the joint humanness shared by both the subject and photographer can lessen the normative behaviour of the person or people photographed.

If the photographer comes away from behind the camera body by using a waist-level viewfinder and or engages more with the subject, the subject will in turn relax and give more of their spirit to the resulting photographic images.

The subject too must be able to trust the photographer to give of their self into the same resulting photographs.

Drink some coffee.

When photography was born, the early cameras were bulky and very noticeable. The image through the lens was transferred onto a large sheet of glass and from this glass plate, a contact print was made. Candid photography was not generally possible. It was only with the start of production of the small rangefinder camera in 1932 and later SLR cameras that it was possible for the photographer to focus accurately and fast candid photography with a small camera was also born.

With the advent of digital photography, the world is awash with the photographic images of everybody and all their neighbours too. The days of many people feeling the need for the services of a person who understood the art of photography are largely over. Everyone now thinks that they are a photographer in their own right. In this wash of people taking pictures of themselves and their friends, the narrative photographer can at last hide in plain sight. The photographer can be invisible in plain sight in this wash of image takers while continuing documenting life as he or she uniquely perceives.

The Leica M6 camera is a small analogue rangefinder camera, it is what I use for most of my personal photographic work. The Leica M6 is a small quiet rangefinder camera and in many ways, it is just like the first rangefinder cameras of 1932 which could be used without much attention called to its self unlike the bulky cameras of those times.

Alongside my Leica M6, I am now starting to use my iPhone 6 phone camera for some of my personal work too.

With the wash of many people taking selfies with mobile phone cameras in public places, I have found out that I can use my mobile phone camera for street photography with drawing close to zero attention to myself while doing my stuff as a narrative photographer.

In many ways, the modern mobile phone camera is the Leica M camera of its day. My iPhone 6 camera is hiding in plain sight in the midst of all the other mobile phone cameras clicking round about…

If you like what you have seen and read here, you can always buy me a $3.00 coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JohnRobinson or PayPal.Me/jrphotographer

#Dialogue…

NELSON MANDELA ATTENDS A REUNION OF HIS WITS UNIVERSITY LAW CLASS. 1996 WITS UNIVERSITY JOHANNESBURG SOUTH AFRICA PHOTO/JOHN ROBINSON

One goal Of dialogue Among Cultures And Civilisations Is To Recognise And To Understand Not Only Cultures And Civilisations Of Others, But Those Of “One’s Own.” We could know ourselves by taking a step away from ourselves and embarking on a journey away from self and homeland and eventually attaining a more profound appreciation of our true identity.

It is only through immersion into another existential dimension that we could attain mediated and acquired knowledge of ourselves in addition to the immediate and direct knowledge that we commonly possess. Through seeing others we attain a hitherto impossible knowledge of ourselves. – Mohammad Khatami, former president of Iran. (pp 267) Reconciliation, Pocket Books, London.

If you like what you have seen and read here, you can always buy me a $3.00 coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JohnRobinson or PayPal.Me/jrphotographer

Covid 19 In South Africa, Coming Through Bitter Experience…

HIV and TB, And Now Covid 19 In South Africa

A lone grave marker in the grass strewn field at Mountain Rise Grave Yard.

A council worker cutting overgrown grass among graves with his ‘bread cutter’

A worker pauses from clearing graves for a smoke.

Tombstones and simple wooden crosses in the mountain rise grave yard.

A daughter looking for her mother’s grave among the wooden crosses marking other resting places of the dead.

A lone bird flies over the still grave yard.

Mourners at a funeral.

Pastors blessing the dead, while a grave digger looks on.

A young child holds flowers for the dead.

Ice cream vendor looking for customers among the graves on a busy Saturday afternoon.

Photos and Words John Robinson

Gogo, you kept us strong when we were bitten by the whip, and we are still strong. Though we are not a nanny state people, through you our elders, we are strong. Though we are not of orderly streets and straight lines. In this Gogo, we are strong.
We know of viruses and microbes in our midst. The devastation they cause runs deep on our pathways, soaking our fields with premature endings that alter the ways of our left-behinds totally, but Gogo, you have made us strong.
Gogo, you have done your bit, you have been strong for us. If it is your time now, pass with peace of mind, you have made us strong. What you have taught us over the years is with us now in this new thing. All your grandchildren are strong now.
-I have had an inner peace that the people of Africa will come through the Covid 19 pandemic stronger than many others with better resources. The difference is in our collective strength through the bitter experience with the viruses and microbes of our daily lives… John Robinson

If you like what you have seen and read here, you can always buy me a $3.00 coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JohnRobinson or PayPal.Me/jrphotographer

 

 

 

 

 

Xenophobia On The Streets of Durban

Crowded in Between a Landlord And Fear of Xenophobia in the Streets of South Africa. Photo John Robinson

The Madiengua family lives in an overcrowded flat in the Point area of Durban, South Africa or “Little Nigeria” as it is locally known.

This family lives with their personal belongings packed in plastic bags in case of immediate eviction by the landlord of their building in the Point area of Durban, South Africa, Paty Madiengua stands with his wife Yvette and 4 children L to R Ephraim (15), Sabrina (14), Geffrey (10) and Genesis (2) in the kitchen of their flat ready be on the move again.

Yvette comes from the village of Buta in Oriental Province, DRC. her parents were killed by the DRC army, she escaped to Kinshasa with her brother and sister where her brother went missing. Yvette met Paty who worked as an egg vendor on the streets of Kinshasa and followed him to South Africa with their 4 children.

Paty works the night shift as a security guard in the city and Yvette sells clothes on the beachfront. Mr Madiengua’s salary does not match up to the rent on their 14th floor flat, the landlords in the area are getting rid of families on the overcrowding rule. While the Madiengua family feel safe in their flat they struggle to keep up with the rent and the cost of a family and they are “fearful of the xenophobia in the townships”.

 

Environmental Portraits, Shooting For Myself

Jessica On a Red Sofa. Photo John Robinson

“There is nothing new in this world” – Ecclesiastes, the preacher, son of David, King in Jerusalem.

When I first got a camera in my hands it was personal; at this point in my life I work well with leather and have started again to make a financial way for myself. Photography has always been a personal thing, now as ever it has always been…

Max and Jason gave me a day job as a leather smith, it’s been a game changer for me I am good at this leather thing and I can get much better too. I feel that where there is leather there is a way forward for me also. I say the following to Max and Jason, “we have a long way together still”.

I have written about perception in the past and it’s personal, now with leather in my picture I am freed to shoot personal, for myself and the best is still to come on all fronts…

 

 

 

 

Shooting Ror Real Raw Files

Ken Rockwell Writes About Real Raw Photographic iles,

I have read his thoughts and I have also referenced him in my dissertation The Full Frame DSLR Camera vs The Analogue 35 mm Rangefinder Camera; but here I want to write about capturing real moments photographically and the .dng open source .raw files that I use in my photographic system…

I came to photography in about 1992, I was attracted to the idea that I could just document what people were doing around me in Johannesburg, South Africa as I was perceiving it. I was not and am still not attracted to trick photography, I use photo editing programs for inserting metadata and adjusting the colour, light and shadow of the digital file to as I saw the moment on the day I took the shot; and I do it in .dng files too. It’s very important that photography is about recording and reading real moments that really happened, and not about producing images of over adjusted colours and changing the construction of the original photograph.

The core value of photography depends on the perceived realness of the photograph…

In those days we were all using photographic film for our images, black & white film for social documentary, colour print for press work and colour transparency for most magazines. Digital photography was still in it’s infancy, we did not know of the ethical monster that we were birthing at the time. Digital photography has now become to be as much about what can be done to the image after leaving the camera as it is about what was done during the moment within the camera.

Photography has lost the perception of truth in the public eye due to the prevailing perception of the ease of digital manipulation of photographic images in those same public eyes, the same eyes that read my pictures and maybe yours too.

I work all my images as .dng files (open source .raw files) in Adobe Bridge CS5 and I like doing so, many photogs (photographers) like doing the same in Adobe Lightroom. I use ‘Bridge CS5 alongside ‘Photoshop CS5 for all of my work.

Working in ‘raw’ has the reputation of processing ‘flexibility’ and greater image ‘quality’ among many digital photographers, both amateurs and professionals…

A young digitally based professional photographer friend of mine aspires to work with colour film one day, I tell him to just go for it now, but he still thinks that it takes extraordinary photographic skills to work with film.

All my important work is now done on colour print film in the same camera that I did my black & white work up till a few months ago, I have migrated to colour print film from black & white film for ease of processing reasons and because I like the feel that colour print film gives to my photography; plus that 50mm Leica lens can’t be beat for it’s crispness.

My work station is an old wooden desk with a hand crafted A2 Oregon pine light box on the one side, a Nikon Coolscan V ED film scanner running VueScan Professional, a MacBook Pro and a 1.5 terabyte external hard drive. The 35mm film dedicated scanner provides me with A3 124 megabyte .dng files off my 35mm colour print film. The .dng files are stored in the external hard drive and I work the files in the Adobe Photoshop CS5 raw window on my MacBook Pro just like any other digital file. I work my .raw files just like any .raw file coming out of a DSLR camera with the benefit of the extra information that the 124 megabyte files afford me; this plus the far greater latitude that colour film gives me over latitude coming out of a digital camera sensor.

All of this rides on a strip of Japanese made plastic and photosensitive emulsion that I buy and process in the Foto 45 shop in the center of Durban. Oh, and the legal proof that what the reader of my photograph sees is actually what I perceived but not chimped with my Leica M6 on the day…