archival ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag

Artwork date: 2021
Signature details: signed
Edition: number 1 from an edition of 10

(1)

image size: 40 x 57 cm; sheet size: 42 x 59.5 cm unframed

Earth Songs I [Mik, cave church on the Orange River, that has been used by nomadic Nama communities as a place of worship for centuries, Pella, Northern Cape, 2021.]

Paul Weinberg is a photographer, curator, filmmaker, writer, educationist, and archivist. He began his career in the early 1980s by working for South African NGOs and photographing current events for news agencies and foreign newspapers. He was a founder member of Afrapix and South, the collective photo agencies that gained local and international recognition for their uncompromising role in documenting apartheid and popular resistance to it. From 1990 onwards, he increasingly concentrated on feature and in-depth projects. He has been published and exhibited widely over a period of 40 years.

In his career he has produced 18 books as a photographer and author, and has been published in many other anthologies and group projects. He taught photography at the Centre of Documentary Studies at Duke University (Durham, USA) and holds a master’s degree from the same university. Weinberg lectured in Documentary Arts and Visual Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and is currently a research associate at the Centre for South African Art and Visual Culture, University of Johannesburg.

Together with David Goldblatt, he founded the Ernest Cole Award for creative photography in southern Africa. He currently works as a curator, archivist, and photographer.

“EarthSongs is a project that explores and celebrates spiritual connections to the land in South Africa. While ‘land’ is a very contested issue, the way people have marked, and celebrated the land remains a critically important, often muted engagement, signifying re-imagining of the land and what the land can mean for a variety of its inhabitants.

In quiet ways beyond the news and headlines, people of all persuasions, faiths and spiritual engagements partake in rituals, formal and informal that mark the land in ways that align with their belief systems. Examples of this are spiritual sites of faith – pilgrimages, archaeological sites, natural wonders, and events where informally spiritual practice take place in the broadest way possible.

This project also explores lesser-known, off the beaten track or unrecognised, unusual sites of spiritual practice and ritual. My project is to look at the landscape and its transformation with regard to spirituality. This is an amalgam of different and diverse connections, signifying spiritual connections to land in South Africa.” This project is a continuation of Weinberg’s work in Moving Spirit, which explored the spiritual practice of a variety of faiths in southern Africa.