images and text
An old colleague and friend, the documentary filmmaker, Gerard van Niekerk, suggested I check out the GROK app. I downloaded and tried out a few things, but was underwhelmed. Gerard suggested that I ask GROK who I was/about me. This came up. It was a bit disturbing. One fact that GROK got wrong is that…
I never completely bought into the belief that “a picture tells a thousand words”. There are way too many times when a well-crafted caption better captures the moment in a picture. The following picture was made in haste, with an iPhone, at a time when I was still getting used to the camera more than…
I was reminded recently, in a round-about way, after a brief meeting with an artist in Cape Town, of my visit to the 2019 Istanbul Biennial. The works on display across Istanbul were inventive and exceptional, but the visit to this great city turned out to be a terribly disappointing expedition. Istanbul never disappoints –…
I was never interested in making pictures of people in the nude. On very rare occasions I made pictures without ever showing the faces of people. A ray of sunlight fell between the curtains. I shot two or three frames.
Harper’s magazine is running an essay, Wishful Thinking: The Aspirations and Failures of the United Nations, by Amanda Chicago Lewis. I guess if your name is Chicago you may be forgiven to be somewhat myopic, and present your country in the best light possible, or at least everyone else in a bad light. Over many…
I have started writing what would be a regular column for Muslim Views, a newspaper based in Cape Town. The column will deal specifically with global issues that affect Islam and the Muslim world, and muslim-majority countries like Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, and, of course, the people of Palestine. I will…
I wrote a couple of pieces on journalism and the news media, in general, in my Daily Maverick column. I place excerpts, here, with links to the original posts. All my Daily Maverick columns are available here. Click on image to get to the column