The Market Photo Workshop in partnership with the family and friends of the late Gisèle Wulfsohn are pleased to announce Phumzile Khanyile as the recipient of the 2015 Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship in Photography. The mentorship is set out as a developmental mentorship and an opportunity to continue Gisèle Wulfsohn’s approach and interests in photography. Khanyile will be mentored by renowned American photographer and filmmaker Ayana V. Jackson.
About Phumzile Khanyile
Phumzile Khanyile, 25 was born in Tladi, Soweto. She enrolled at the Market Photo Workshop in August 2013 and successfully completed the foundation and Intermediate Course. She worked with photographer Musa Nxumalo’s online portfolio and was part of the Corridor Exhibition at the Market Photo workshop. In September 2014 as part of the Advanced Programme in Photography she produced “1411 Mohapi Street” a photography project which went on to be show cased as part of a group exhibition at Kalashnikovv Gallery titled “Seeing through the complexities of difference”.
During the Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship in Photography, Khanyile proposes to explore stigmas, stereotypical ideas on gender, sexual preference and associated relevance in today’s society. Guided by mentor Ayana .V Jackson, Phumzile will compare and contrast her observation of ‘popular cultures’ as represented in media to the environments and communities she has lived within and is part of.
About Ayana V. Jackson
She combines honed technical skills with richly laced historical allusions to create hauntingly candid portraits that depict varying constructions of African and African-American identities. She does this through several photographic approaches ranging from reportage and portraiture to performance and studio based practice.
Based between Johannesburg, New York and Paris, Jackson has exhibited her work in association with Gallery MOMO (Johannesburg, RSA), Galerie Baudoin Lebon, (Paris, FR), Primo Marella Gallery (Milan), Galerie Sho Contemporary (Tokyo, Japan), the San Francisco Mexican Museum (USA), Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA), USA, and the Philadelphia African American Museum (USA).
Previous recipients:
- 2014 – Siphosihle Mkhwanazi
- 2013 – Sydelle Willow Smith
About the Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship in Photography
The Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship in Photography has been developed to provide an emerging photographer the infrastructural support to develop a body of work. The mentorship has been created by the family and friends of the late Gisèle Wulfsohn to honour her memory and her work; and is seen as an opportunity to continue her approach and interests in photography. Wulfsohn dedicated her life and photography to awareness, openness and respect; she worked on issues of democracy, HIV/AIDS and positive sexual identities, social inclusion and gender issues, and maintained a commitment to education and social change. The mentorship is aimed at developing emerging voices that are committed to similar issues.
About the Market Photo Workshop
For twenty-six years, the Market Photo Workshop has played a pivotal role in the training of South Africa’s photographers, ensuring that visual literacy reaches neglected and marginalized parts of our society. Since it was founded in 1989, by world-renowned photographer David Goldblatt, the Photo Workshop has been an agent of change and representation, informing photographers, visual artists, educators, students and broader communities of trends, issues, and debates in photography and visual culture.
The Market Photo Workshop also runs a number of Public Programmes, which are a series of events involving and directed at professional photographers, visual artists, educators, students as well as the broader public. These Public Programmes seek to inform the trends, practices, methods, and contemporary ways of working and thinking in South African photography practice through exposure to a broad understanding of visual culture as well as a networking platform that encourages critical thinking and engagements.
Showcasing a number of high profile local and international photographers, as well as student and alumni photography work, the Market Photo Workshop has been able to build a strong and consistent audience base around our gallery, ‘The Photo Workshop Gallery’ in Newtown, which is on the same premises as the school. Since 2005, when the gallery was initially launched, the kind of platform it has engendered encourages not only emerging students to experience and enter into professional practice, but has distilled a new type of photographic practice amongst the greater artistic community. Various critical discourses, especially around the role documentary photography, have been stimulated by the multitude of exhibitions that have shown at The Photo Workshop Gallery creating dynamic interactions between students and the greater photography community.
