Matthew Burbidge
‘Newspapers are the best place to start photographing one moment you’re with Nelson Mandela and the next you’re in a shack,” says documentary photographer Jodi Bieber, who won a first place at this year’s World Press Awards. This is the sixth prize (three firsts, two seconds and a third) Bieber has won at the competition, a kind of Olympics of photography.
This year’s winning entry is a desolate, 12-photograph series in black and white of the journey of illegal immigrants back to Mozambique. The series starts with the arrest of a man in his Hillbrow flat a policeman grabs his arm and examines his inoculation marks (apparently one of the ways to tell if a person is from another country) and then bundles him into a van, leaving a woman and a child behind.
The next few photographs were taken in Lindela, the bleak Gauteng holding centre for the illegals. The day before Bieber arrived, a Nigerian had apparently cut off a guard’s finger. People look distrustfully at the camera and some hide their faces.
The gritty, grainy series echoes some of David Goldblatt’s work on displaced people and, at times, the scenes almost look like a film set. Bieber also travelled with the illegals on the train back to Mozambique. There are rows and rows of men, squatting on the seats, with empty luggage racks above their heads. To deter escape, officials order the men to take off their belts and clip them to the overhead rails.
Bieber rode the train twice, once accompanied by a Mail & Guardian team and, the second time, “just me and the illegal immigrants”. “I didn’t know what they would do to me they didn’t trust me,” she says.
The windows on the train are all left open. Once the guards leave (or are paid to look the other way), the men leap out, starting as early as the Jeppe station. In one extraordinary image, Bieber depicts a young man about to jump, crouching at the open door somewhere near Witbank. He looks like he’s only just felt the rushing wind and seen the ground tearing along in front of him. The photograph was taken early in the morning with hardly any light and, as Bieber never uses flash “I don’t know how” the photograph was exposed for nearly four seconds.
Bieber started photographing at The Star in 1993 on a cadet course, and has been a freelancer since then. She’s one of the few documentary photographers in South Africa who has been able to make a living but isn’t sure of the secret of her success.
“I just go out and I shoot. I’m composing and thinking, and looking how to tell the story in an honest way I don’t know what my style is. I just try to immerse myself in the community, and once you’re accepted, they think, ‘Oh Jodi’s only taking another picture,’ and they stop posing.”
Bieber is understandably protective of her work. She objects to images she has made as part of a particular project being used out of context. “These photographs are not just stock images they’re of real people and not just a story.”
Bieber is now in Pakistan, where she will spend six weeks photographing women and children for the Learning for Life organisation in London. Before she left there was head-to-toe clothes-shopping to be done so she wouldn’t stand out too much in the largely Muslim country. Bieber will be shooting in colour and expects to use all of her 150 rolls of film.