In memory of...

I've always been intrigued by roadside memorials, so much so that I've been photographing them for a few years now. I guess, it could be the fact that as I drive by them, I always think about how somebody died quite violently doing exactly what I'm doing at that moment (driving), and that in a different time, it could have been me or somebody I love involved in that fatal crash.There lies the power of these and why I think that they are important for road safety, way more important and effective than some cop hiding behind a bridge to give you a fine for driving 11 kph over the speed limit.


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Red Ants, run!

Angry Edenpark residents burn stolen Red-Ant equipment after some of the Red-Ants, (a rag-tag private security company tasked with evictions and other dirty jobs) killed a man during evictions in Edenpark near Alberton, Gauteng. After the Red Ants apparently beat a man to death, for trying to stop them assaulting his wife during an eviction, the illegal residents of Edenpark went on the rampage. They really wanted to attack the Red-Ants, the crowd consisted mostly of older woman, rough young girls, some really young drunk looking boys and a lot of really drunk looking men, but I'll tell you, the Red-Ants were lucky the cops were there, these people were so wound up that they wanted to tear the Red-Ants apart... and to tell the truth, I reckon they would have done it quite easily. The Red-Ants sit around under police guard from angry residents that want to attack them.

'Tis the season...

Police crime scene investigators comb through the mangled remains of the cash-in-transit van that was held up this morning. A group forced the van off the road under a bridge, fired some shots at the windows, then used explosives to open the van.It's started... Every year around November the cash-in-transit robberies increase dramatically. We journalists joke that it's because the thugs want their Christmas bonus, but its simply cause there's more money changing hands around this time. One thing I know there will be many more... These guys were not playing, they used explosives to blow the back of the van open, but they still couldn't get any of the cash.

Save the Bok!

Yet again, politicians stick their idiotic noses into a matter that they should leave alone.

Parliament's Sport Portfolio Commitee member, Butana Komphela has decided that the Springbok emblem on the South African Rugby team jersey, must go.

Two of the greatest sporting achievements that this country has ever produced have happened under this emblem, yet he says there is "no negotiation" about this.
There is a proud heritage to the Springbok emblem, not least, the momentous occasion when Nelson Mandela wore it to hand Francois Pienaar the William Webb Ellis trophy when SA won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. That did more for reconciliation than any self serving current politician could.

In 2007, we won it again, The nation cheered, screamed and occasionally yelped for the Springboks, now these people want to take it away.

I reckon the only thing that should be taken away is Komphela, take him away - far, far away.

A new party...

Former ANC chairperson, Mosioua Lekota speaks during a press briefing at Primedia Place in Sandton, Johannesburg. Mosioua Lekota has hinted that he is going to start a new splinter party of the ANC. Now, personally, I feel that is great, as I have always thought that the ANC's outright majority is a cause of concern in a real democratic country, so all I can do is wish him luck in his endeavours and hope that the party he forms will become a viable opposition for the voters that may be disillusioned by the current situation in the ANC.
The more power the opposition parties have, the harder it is for power to be abused by the ruling party.

Mandela meets our heroes

The medal winners from the SA Paralympic team and the one medal winner from the SA Olympic team visited Nelson Mandela at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. One of them that stands out to me is Oscar Pistorius, I really admire his attitude and passion for success, hopefully next Olympics, he will be able to compete with able-bodied athletes and give them a good run for their money.
Nelson Mandela meets with Oscar Pistorius.

What a "pole' dancer!

Tracey Simmonds, Miss Pole Dance UK performs during the first day of SEXPO, the health, sexuality and lifestyle expo at Gallagher Estate, Johannesburg. I'll admit that I haven't had much experience with pole dancers, but this woman was amazing, the upper body strength she must have, to hold herself up and do all those gymnastic moves on this skiny pole, without once looking like she is straining. I was very impressed.

Don't hide.

Theres not many things that I can say I hate about my job, but covering court is top of the list. I spent all day waiting outside the Magistrates Court in Johannesburg for Judge Nkola Motata to come out from his trial for drunk driving. So after standing in the sun from about 9, at about 4:30, we see him in the distance through an opening in the court parking lot's door, walking towards his car, and then to avoid us, he is allowed to drive out the one-way on the other side of the court. (Nice, how there is certain rules for some and certain for others). So, nobody got him...Then we all say our goodbyes and go on our way, as I turn a corner, I overtake a stationary Jaguar on the side of the road, and notice it's the drunk Judge. So, I slow down and wait for it at the stop-street, and get a few shots of him.
He sure wasn't impressed, but I was...

Underground again.

The Gautrain tunnel at Mushroom Farm Park near Sandton.

What a thumping!

The Springboks played Australia at Coca-Cola Park (formerly Ellis Park) in a Tri-Nations encounter in which the Springboks won with a convincing scoreline of 53-8Pierre Spies races toward the try line.
Prop Jannie Du Plessis pushes through the Australian backline.Recently there was talk about Ellis Park being the spritual home of the Springboks, well I think that may have been confirmed with the 53-8 defeat of Australia, that absolutely no-one could have predicted, including me, who embarrasingly said that Australia would beat the boks 17-10 in a prematch competition.

But even though it is the biggest winning margin against Australia, we will still end up 3rd in the Tri-Nations.

But, at least we had one great game...

Good times!

A suspected drugdealer runs away from police in Hillbrow during ongoing operations to curb drug dealing and use in Hillbrow, Johannesburg.            

 Drugs are the root causes of all the other crime in the area according to police.

A policeman sneaks up on some suspected drug dealers.

A suspected drug dealer fell under this trailer in his bid to run away from police. He recieved no sympathy from the police :)

It's been a while since I've had a good run about chasing cops, chasing criminals. I really enjoyed it, I even found it quite easy, I reckon I'm getting much fitter from playing Action-Soccer. The cops were doing operations to bust drug dealers and rubber bullets were flying all over the place, and then there's this lone camera-man chasing them all over the show, flashes blazing.

Good times...

A silver lining?, where?

South Africa's sole medal winner, Khotso Mokoena during a press conference at the Southern Sun, OR Tambo in Johannesburg airport after team SA returned home from the Beijing Olympics.A lot has been said about SA's poor performance during the Olympics, in fact, in relation to the number of athletes sent, SA was the worst performing team in the entire world. Now for a country that is widely regarded as a sporting country, that is just not on.

I personally believe that the powers that be have been sticking their political, undercover rascist noses into the team a bit too much, but we can leave that for another post :)

One of the talking points is the funding aspect. Other countries have spent much more money on their teams than ours, personally I reckon that they should bin the team, spend the money on trying to get rid of informal settlements and putting poor people in houses.

Now thats an idea!
Mokoena won a silver medal in the long jump.

More rugby, man!

Vodacom Cheetahs from Free-State play Xerox Lions from Johannesburg at Coca Cola Park, (ex Ellis Park) in Johannesburg. The Cheetahs won 38-28 during a action filled match.I've decided that I'm going to shoot a lot of rugby from now on, including the smaller provincial matches with a view to using them as a practice for the international matches. One of my new short term goals is to win the SASOL Springbok Photographer of the Year next year.
So wish me luck... and watch this space :)

This is gonna hurt!

Argentina's Patricio Albacete runs into Percy Montgomery, Luke Watson and Pierre Spies during the test between Argentina at Coca Cola Park in Johannesburg that the Springboks won 63-9.CJ Van Der Linde and Beast Mtawarira on the attack.

Two example of pics I shot during the test between Argentina and South Africa showing Argentinians thinking, "oh, no , this is gonna hurt!"

Mandela's long birthday party

Bafana Bafana and the Springboks light candles on two cakes to wish Nelson Mandela a belated Happy Birthday at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Even though Nelson Mandela's birthday is on the 18 July, celebrations still continue. Today the South African football and rugby teams visited him under the glare of the worlds media. The media piles in to the Nelson Mandela Foundation's small, poorly lit auditorium, as they always do when Mandela is involved. The two teams gave him a big cake each, they lit the candles, sung happy birthday, and shared a joke or two.

As I was leaving I noticed the untouched cakes being packed into boxes, "I'm sure he and everyone around him is sick of cake by now", I thought to myself. I found out later that after the throngs of media left the Foundation, a small group of people including Mandela visited a small hospice in Alexandra unannounced to give them the cakes...

I liked that...

Getting the call up..

Manchester United striker, Wayne Rooney coasts the ball past Kaizer Chiefs goalkeeper, Khune Itumeleng during the final of the Vodacom Challenge yesterday. As was widely expected, European Champions and English Premier League champions, Manchester United won 4-0, but the match was played in good spirits and was loved by the many Manchester United and Kaizer Chiefs fans in South Africa.

I shot the final match of the Vodacom Challenge, which by its self was great, as the photographers are on the field right behind the goal line, one of my personal highlights was when the ball rolled out for a corner, straight to me and Ryan Giggs gestured for me to pass it to him. So, I gave it a sweeping kick straight to him (He then turned around to look at Sir Alex Ferguson, and pointed to me, so I guess I can expect the call-up for the first team any day now), OK, that bit didn't happen, but maybe it should have, as on Sunday in my weekly Action Soccer game, I scored within the first 20 seconds of the game and ended up with a hat trick, so I reckon they should consider giving me a call soon :)

Dance, Zuma, Dance!

ANC President, Jacob Zuma performs a Zulu dance during a event in which, he assisted Gift of the Givers in handing out blankets to the people of Tembisa in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg.
It seems that Jacob Zuma is starting to hit the campaign trail. He joined local radio station, Jacaranda and Muslim charity organisation, The Gift of the Givers in a media event to distribute free blankets to the voting masses of Tembisa. He delivered a speech, cracked a few jokes, then proceeded to hand some blankets and a few hugs to a couple of frail and elderly people, then a couple of cute, but scruffy kids, whilst the photographers went mad getting shots of this. Minutes later, after a brief dancing interlude, he sped off in his convoy of black BMWs, probably off for a shower. So fast in fact, that he forgot to sing his trademark song, Mshini Wami.
Yep, the campaign has begun...

No flash please!

Graca Michel reacts as the frail Nelson Mandela lifts his cane to acknowledge a member of the crowd as he is helped onto stage for the Sixth Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Kliptown Soweto.

The Sixth Annual Nelson Mandela lecture was delivered by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia and the first democratically elected female President in Africa.

Photographing Nelson Mandela is always a bit tricky, so much so, that this is the second entry to touch on it. It gets trickier, when you are only able to photograph for a few minutes. The press sit in the waiting room and then at a specific time run (all the time jostling for that elusive front position) to a door, where we wait again... The door opens everyone squeezes through and gets to the front of the stage, pick your positions well, cause you can't move much. Low light, no flash allowed when shooting Madiba. He is lead to the front of the stage, and their is always one idiot that decides to use flash anyway (which resulted in someone coming and standing right in front of me, to tell him to stop). After what feels like two nanoseconds, we are ushered out, and you're standing outside, hoping you got something usable...luckily I did.

Get in, sit down, shut up and hang on !

A SAPS chopper that crashed after hitting powerlines whilst chasing two armed robbers in Meadowlands, Soweto.

I'm sure it was one helluva ride...

A real exercise!

On our way to a march at the SABC, Chris (Citizen reporter) and I get a call from the office, a bus is on fire near Lenasia, so we turn around and speed off towards where this bus is, eventually we come to some traffic. Taking a chance, I lean out of the car window and call a Metro-Police officer over, I explain that we're from the press, hoping that he will tell us how far the bus is away from us, he promptly stops all the cars and ushers us through, So, now we have the highway to ourselves and I'm telling Chris how astonished I am that we got that response from the police. We come up to the scene and stop, I jump out and run to the flames, after about a minute it dawns on me that even thought this scene includes two busses and a tanker on fire, there is no injured people around, but I carry on moving around shooting, then Chris comes up to me and says "Its a play", only then do I realise that the whole incident is a exercise to test the response of the emergency services.... Guess it was also a test for us... Maybe I should have cottoned on when I seen the spray paint on the tanker "Out of Order".

Refugee camps

A lone guard watches the empty tents of the Kaserne refugee camp near Johannesburg. The old Kaserne shunting station will be used to house thousands of refugees that fled from xenophobic violence recently .

The soon to be populated Kaserne refugee camp is in an old shunting yard in Johannesburg, but at least it has a roof, and the UNHCR tents are a far cry from the ones that most of these people had recently (if they were lucky!). The whole situation is really dire, these people cannot do anything to help themselves and will probably stay in these camps for a long, long time.

Some serious rubbish

South African Municipal Workers (SAMWU) members spread rubbish on the streets of Edenvale, Johannesburg. They are protesting about working conditions and pay. Wow, these guys sure made a mess, tipping over refuse bins, emptying them all over the street and lobbing black bags all over the place.
Even though I'm really not a fan of this (especially because I live in Edenvale), I do understand why they do it. The only time the municipalities will listen to anyone is when some form of action similar to this is done.
It's the same with the government, people can talk, people can shout, people can even beg, but it seems they only listen when it becomes a problem for them...

The fire spreads

A policeman secures a scene where locals burnt down a large number of shacks belonging to foreigners in Reiger Park, near Johannesburg.

Long time dead

The body of a foreign man whose head had been severely beaten lies on Main Reef road in Primrose last night. The pipe next to him was going to be used to set him on fire.Last night, a couple of colleagues and I were driving around an informal settlement in Primrose, Johannesburg looking for pics on the ongoing xenophobic violence that has spread from Alexandra to other areas around Gauteng. I seen a few men standing around a man lying in the street. We turned around and drove towards them, the man was very injured and they were about to set him on fire, we stopped and the crowd started shouting in Zulu at us to leave, we drove away fast to get the cops, hoping to save the guy from an agonising fiery death, as we were on our way to go to where we knew some cops were, I seen about 10 policeman patrolling between the shacks in the darkness, I jumped out of the car ( it was still moving, may I add) and ran towards the cops, understandably they were on edge, having been fired at a few times already tonight, as they seen me running towards them screaming "COPS!" each one of them raised their rifles and pointed them at me, about to shoot at me until I screamed as loud as I could" PRESS!!!!"....

Must admit, that was a bit hectic.

Anyway, when we got back there the guy was obviously a long time dead, as his head seemed to have been bashed with something very big and very hard.

But at least we tried...

Foreigners in Alex

A suspected foreigner is attacked by a group of Alexandra residents after violence flared up overnight with residents attacking foreigners, because they believe that they are taking their jobs and are all criminals.



What really surprised me about this whole thing, was the attitude by the majority of the people that I spoke to, some of them seemed slightly educated and some of them not, but they all thought that treating these people like this was fine.

Look at this guy on the left, he epitomizes the attitude I seen, he actually believes that what he did was right and is proud of what he has done....



I was just a few hundred meters away, when I noticed a man running away from a crowd, I ran up to where they caught him and my picture taking was the only reason they stopped, they even posed with the beaten man and asked me to take a pic (of course, I refused). Then they dragged him up and they all seemed jubilant, I asked them what he did, as I took some more pics, they simply replied that he was a foreigner.I guess that made it alright for them...

This happened near to the Alex clinic and I sincerely believe the only reason they frogmarched him there and left him alone was because of my presence... I'm pretty sure I know what would have happened if I wasn't there.

Joshua the smiling chimp

Pictures that I took on the 12th October 2006 of Joshua, a baby chimpanzee being presented to the media for the first time at the Johannesburg Zoo.
A young chimpanzee that I photographed a while ago was killed after getting involved in a fight with older chimps at the Johannesburg Zoo. He made the headlines again after Netcare 911 ambulanced him to a hospital. His birth was well covered by the media and so was his death.

The Confederations Cup...Class football

South African star striker, Ntando Nzuza gets away from Portugals Tyrique Swartland in the Confederations Cup-Final, that South Africa eventually won 3-0.Today, I went to shoot a school soccer tournament that was themed after the Confederations Cup that will be hosted here in June, each team representing one of the countries that will participate. The entire school was involved and it was hilarious when the younger players were playing, as every player on the field (sometimes, including the goalie), chased the ball, so you have this ball with a large group of kids following it all over the field.
These Grade ones could really do with a bit of spacing out...

Some protests are more boring than others.

Although it does look like he's yawning, a SACP member makes red-indian calls, as his friend jumps up and down during a protest march by the SACP and COSATU to ESKOM offices in Braamfontein to show their opposition to a 53 % increase in electricity charges.

A few years back when I was still new to the whole press-photography thing, I had a chat to a colleague during a protest about how much I loved these protest marches, he said that he was bored with them and that they're all the same, I was shocked, HOW could he say that, each one I had been to had excited me and I ran around taking pictures of pretty much everything I seen.

Today, I was at this SACP march and finally understood what he was saying, every protest is essentially the same, no matter the issue at hand, they march, they jump up and down , they sing the same songs from past struggles, they read out a memorandum to whoever then they leave...
So, I think its taken a while for me to get over the whole protest thing, but I'm still amped to go to them, because sooner or later someone is going to lob a rock at the cops or smash a window and all hell will break loose and the boredom will all go away fast, very fast indeed.