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| After Sunset : Milnerton Beach, Cape Town |
Abstract
"This essay examines how existential motifs - finitude, presence, alienation, memory, identity, temporality, and the ethical exposure of the body - appear in contemporary photographic practice in Cape Town, South Africa. After briefly situating “existential photography” as an interpretive frame, I describe city-specific conditions that make Cape Town a rich site for such photographic inquiry. I then offer sustained profiles of several photographers whose work embodies or intersects with existential concerns (Vernon Chalmers, Jo Ractliffe, Berni Searle, Thania Petersen, Zanele Muholi), discuss recurring themes, stylistic choices, ethical tensions, and institutional contexts (Michaelis School of Fine Art, Zeitz MOCAA). The essay concludes with reflections on practice, audience, and prospective directions for existential photography in Cape Town.
“Existential photography” is not a rigid school but an interpretive lens: photographs that foreground lived being-in-the-world, situated subjectivity, exposure and vulnerability of bodies, temporality and transience, solitude and community, and ethical engagement with history and place. Such work often emphasizes mood and attunement over mere reportage; it uses composition, light, negative space, horizon, and embodied presence to evoke philosophical concerns - mortality, freedom, alienation, authenticity, responsibility - foundational to existential thought (see, for instance, the ways artists articulate presence, memory, and narrative in their statements and portfolios). In Cape Town this orientation is shaped by local geographies and histories, producing work at once regionally specific and philosophically resonant (Zeitz MOCAA, 2025; Michaelis School of Fine Art, n.d.). (zeitzmocaa.museum)
2. Why Cape Town? Social, Historical, and Geographic ConditionsCape Town’s particular mix of dramatic natural scenery (coastal horizons, Table Mountain, fynbos), layered histories (colonial settlement, apartheid spatial planning, forced removals), and contemporary social inequality creates a fertile frame for photography that asks existential questions. Landscapes in Cape Town are rarely neutral: they are marked by past violence (e.g., forced removals in District Six and the socio-spatial legacies visible across the Cape Flats). Photographers working in and from Cape Town frequently engage the way place holds history and shapes identity; this interplay between geography and memory is a strong engine for existential photographic themes (Ractliffe, n.d.; Zeitz MOCAA, 2025). (South African History Online)
Moreover, the city’s cultural institutions - galleries, art schools, and museums - support experimental practice while also supplying platforms that bring local concerns into international conversation. The Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and institutions like Zeitz MOCAA, for example, create curricular, curatorial, and exhibition opportunities that allow photographers to probe philosophical and social questions through image-making and public programs (Michaelis School of Fine Art, n.d.; Zeitz MOCAA, 2025). (Wikipedia)
3. Key Practitioners and their Existential ResonancesSeveral photographers who are either based in Cape Town or whose work circulates deeply there are profiled below. The selection is neither exhaustive nor definitive; it aims to highlight a range of practices - documentary, staged self-portraiture, landscape, and nature photography - that collectively illuminate existential preoccupations.
3.1 Vernon Chalmers — Attention, Horizon, and Non-human Presence
Vernon Chalmers works across landscapes, seascapes, and studies of non-human life (notably birds), and pairs technical refinement with an explicitly reflective posture about perception, attention, and temporality. Recent writing and portfolio material by Chalmers situate his practice within what he (and commentators) term an “existential” orientation - photography as contemplative attention, attending to the precariousness and beauty of living presence (Chalmers, 2025). His bird-in-flight series and minimalist horizons use suspension, negative space, and the pause of the shutter to suggest transience and the tension between movement and stillness - an apt photographic metaphor for existential ambivalence (Chalmers, 2025). Chalmers also links photographic practice to pedagogy and mindfulness: the act of looking is presented as an ethical and ontological practice, not just a technical one. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Existential notes. Chalmers’ images often emphasize waiting and attention - qualities associated with existential presence. By freezing motion (flight, waves) he renders the immediate moment both finite and present with possibility; by prioritizing non-human subjects he also invites reflection on human–nonhuman relationality and the vulnerability shared across species.
3.2 Jo Ractliffe — Landscape, Trauma, and Photographic Testimony
Jo Ractliffe (born in Cape Town) is internationally recognized for work that frames landscape as the site of memory, violence, and aftereffects of conflict. Her photographic practice - often black and white, with a careful attention to light and mute tonality - makes visible traces: scarred ground, abandoned infrastructure, borderlands that register displacement and historical violence (Ractliffe, n.d.; Stevenson, n.d.). Ractliffe frames landscape as an index of human action: absence and emptiness are not neutral but dense with historical weight. (Wikipedia)
Existential notes. Ractliffe’s photographs insist that landscapes carry ethical demands: the traces they contain call observers to memory, responsibility, and acknowledgment. The absence of figures in many images heightens the sense of absence and loss, provoking reflection on temporality, mortality (of social orders, of communities), and the ethics of witnessing.
3.3 Berni Searle — The Body as Archive and Site Of Vulnerability
Berni Searle, born in Cape Town and an alumnus of Michaelis, works across photography, video, and installation. Much of her work stages the body - often her own - as a site where personal biography, race, and national histories intersect (Searle, n.d.). Searle’s images and moving-image installations frequently use subtle performative elements - submerged bodies, veiled faces, traces of pigment - to make visible the embodied effects of history and identity. Her practice is explicitly concerned with the body’s exposure to political and symbolic violences (Searle, n.d.). (Richard Saltoun)
Existential notes. Searle’s oeuvre foregrounds vulnerability, exposure, and the limits of testimonial language; the photographed or filmed body becomes a living archive, demanding ethical recognition. The work thereby engages existential questions of finitude, agency, and the integrity of the self when confronted with historical inscription.
3.4 Thania Petersen — Self-Portraiture, Heritage, and Enacted Memory
Thania Petersen is a Cape Town artist whose practice includes self-portraiture, installation, and performance. Petersen’s work draws on Cape Malay, Islamic, and Indonesian narratives to explore identity, migration, and the afterlives of colonial histories. Her staged self-portraits and tapestry-like installations reconstruct and reframe inherited narratives while insisting on embodied presence (Petersen, n.d.). (Nicodim Gallery)
Existential notes. Petersen’s practice interrogates how facticity (ancestry, history, place) shapes subjectivity and how acts of self-narration and performance can be modes of ethical self-repair or reclamation. Her work returns us to existential themes: authenticity, responsibility to one’s heritage, and the tension between ownership of identity and imposed narratives.
3.5 Zanele Muholi — Visual Activism, Visibility, and The Ethics Of Portraiture
4. Recurring Themes and MotifsThough born in Umlazi (KwaZulu-Natal), Zanele Muholi lives and works in Cape Town and occupies a central place in South Africa’s contemporary photographic field. Muholi describes themself as a “visual activist” and has produced long-term portrait projects (e.g., Faces and Phases) that document Black lesbian, transgender, and gender-nonconforming lives; more recent work (Somnyama Ngonyama) uses self-portraiture to address racialization and visual power (Muholi, n.d.). Muholi’s portraits insist on recognition and archival visibility as ethical acts that counter erasure (Muholi, n.d.). (Wikipedia)
Existential notes. Muholi’s practice raises existential questions about being seen, being counted in history, and the political stakes of existence for marginalized communities. The intimate portrait - face, gesture, gaze - becomes foreground for questions of dignity, survival, and the right to a narrative life.
From the practices profiled above we can identify several recurring existential motifs in Cape Town photography.
4.1 Place as Palimpsest (Memory, History, Erasure)
Photographers here frequently treat landscape as layered with human histories. The visible and invisible marks of displacement, conflict, and structural injustice figure centrally. Jo Ractliffe’s approach - landscape as testimony - is an emblematic case (Ractliffe, n.d.). (Wikipedia)
4.2 Body, Vulnerability, and Identity
Many photographers use the body - staged, photographed, submerged - as a locus of historical inscription, suffering, and resilience (Searle, n.d.; Petersen, n.d.). These images force viewers to confront the ethical dimensions of recognition and care. (Richard Saltoun)
4.3 Horizon, Sea, and the Sublime
Cape Town’s coastlines, tides, and horizon lines form repeated metaphors for limit, openness, and existential dread or hope. Vernon Chalmers’ seascapes and studies of flight use horizon motifs to explore finitude and possibility (Chalmers, 2025). (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
4.4 Witnessing and Archive
There is a sustained interest in photography’s capacity to witness (to count, to archive) as an ethical project. Zanele Muholi’s archival impetus - making visible those historically erased - is paradigmatic (Muholi, n.d.). (TIME)
4.5 Liminality, Silence, and Negative Space
5. Style, Craft, and TechniqueAesthetic choices - empty space, muted palettes, chiaroscuro, black-and-white tonality - are used to cultivate a contemplative mood and to leave room for absence, doubt, and reflection. These visual strategies amplify existential affect (see portfolios and essays by the artists above). (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Existential photographers often favor techniques that slow down seeing: long exposures, sparse composition, muted palettes, and careful control of light. They may also use staged self-portraiture or performative gestures to make the presence of the photographer (and the photographed) ethically and ontologically explicit. Such choices are not mere aesthetics but philosophical devices: slowing time, cultivating silence, and making absence palpable are ways to elicit reflection on being and temporality (Chalmers, 2025; Searle, n.d.). (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
6. Institutions, Pedagogy, and Public LifeCape Town’s public cultural institutions and educational programs help shape the conditions for existential photography. Zeitz MOCAA, as a major museum of contemporary African art, provides exhibition platforms and public programs that foreground critical and reflective work, while the Michaelis School of Fine Art is a long-standing training ground for photographers and artists whose work often engages social and philosophical themes (Zeitz MOCAA, 2025; Michaelis School of Fine Art, n.d.). These institutions circulate local practices internationally and foster critical discourse within the city. (zeitzmocaa.museum)
7. Ethical Considerations and TensionsExistential photography - especially when focused on marginal communities - must negotiate representation ethics. Photographers working in Cape Town face four recurring tensions:
- Representation vs. Exploitation. Images of poverty, trauma, or marginalization must not exoticize or commodify suffering. Local practitioners and community-based projects often foreground agency and consent to mitigate such risks (Searle, n.d.; Petersen, n.d.). (Richard Saltoun)
- Aesthetics vs. Testimony. The language of sublime or beautiful imagery can sometimes obscure ethical obligations to historical truth or social justice; photographers must decide how to balance aesthetic form with testimonial clarity (Ractliffe, n.d.). (Wikipedia)
- Archival Responsibility. Photographers like Muholi treat archiving and documentation as ethical acts that redress erasure; archival work raises questions about access, custody, and the power of images to shape historical memory (Muholi, n.d.). (TIME
- Ecological Sensitivity. Nature photography (e.g., Chalmers) that foregrounds nonhuman life also encounters ecological ethics - how to photograph without harming habitats, and how to make images that spur care rather than only aesthetic consumption (Chalmers, 2025). (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Two brief case studies show how existential themes are enacted in practice.
- Case Study A — A Meditative Practice: Vernon Chalmers’ Bird and Horizon Work
Chalmers’ portfolios and written reflections position photography as a meditative practice: the act of waiting, of attention, is as important as the final image (Chalmers, 2025). The bird-in-flight series, for instance, suspends motion and invites viewers to dwell in a threshold moment - an image that is both indexical and metaphysical. The horizon seascapes similarly use minimalism to provoke questions about limit, openness, and the human relation to vastness. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
- Case Study B — Bearing Witness: Jo Ractliffe’s Landscapes of Afterlife
Ractliffe’s work treats landscape as a witness to social violence. Her images do not dramatize but instead accumulate quiet traces that demand memory work from viewers; this method transforms landscape into a philosophical space where past and present meet and ethical responsibility becomes unavoidable (Ractliffe, n.d.). (Wikipedia)
Cape Town photographers working with existential themes often find their work participating in wider international networks - exhibitions, biennials, and publications. This circulatory process influences both the work and its reception: local specificity is translated into global philosophical vocabularies (e.g., memory studies, decolonial critique, environmental humanities). Artists such as Ractliffe, Searle, and Muholi have had major international exposure, which both amplifies their ethical concerns and introduces new interpretive frames (Stevenson; Zeitz MOCAA; press coverage). (STEVENSON)
10. Future DirectionsSeveral lines of development suggest themselves for existential photography in Cape Town:
- Ecological Existentialism. Photographers increasingly combine environmental urgency with questions of being and responsibility (e.g., attention to coastal change, species decline).
- Participatory and Community Archives. Practices that make communities co-authors of their visual archives can shift the ethics of representation and strengthen local agency (Muholi’s archival ethos is a precedent). (TIME)
- Theory/Practice Integration. More explicit engagement with phenomenology, memory studies, and decolonial critique in artist statements, essays, and teaching could deepen the philosophical reflexivity of photographic practice (Michaelis School of Fine Art, n.d.). (Wikipedia)
Existential photography in Cape Town is a plural and dynamic field. It binds formal, technical choices (light, negative space, horizon, tonality) to deep philosophical concerns about presence, memory, identity, and ethical witness. Photographers such as Vernon Chalmers, Jo Ractliffe, Berni Searle, Thania Petersen, and Zanele Muholi illustrate how photography can be both an aesthetic and an existential practice: images that not only represent but also demand reflection, recognition, and responsibility. Supported by institutions like Michaelis and Zeitz MOCAA, and shaped by Cape Town’s layered geographies and histories, this praxis is likely to deepen - turning the photographic image into an ongoing site of philosophical, ethical, and political work.
ReferencesChalmers, V. (2025). Vernon Chalmers: Existential photography / Navigating the colour of being [Portfolio and essays]. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.vernonchalmers.photography/2025/09/vernon-chalmers-existential-photography.html. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Michaelis School of Fine Art. (n.d.). Michaelis School of Fine Art — University of Cape Town. Retrieved October 2025, from http://www.michaelis.uct.ac.za/ (See also Michaelis School profile). (Wikipedia)
Muholi, Z. (n.d.). Biography and projects (e.g., Faces and Phases, Somnyama Ngonyama). Stevenson / Guggenheim / press coverage. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/zanele-muholi and https://www.stevenson.info/artist/zanele-muholi/biography. (Guggenheim Museum)
Petersen, T. (n.d.). Biography and artist pages. Everard Read / Nicodim. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.everard-read-capetown.co.za/artist/THANIA_PETERSEN/biography and https://www.nicodimgallery.com/artists/thania-petersen. (everard-read-capetown.co.za)
Ractliffe, J. (n.d.). Artist biography and work overview. Stevenson / SA History / The Photographers’ Gallery. Retrieved October 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Ractliffe; https://www.stevenson.info/artist/jo-ractliffe/biography; https://sahistory.org.za/people/jo-ractliffe. (Wikipedia)
Searle, B. (n.d.). Biography and selected works. Stellenbosch Triennale / Ocula / Richard Saltoun. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.stellenboschtriennale.com/artist/berni-searle and https://ocula.com/artists/berni-searle/ and https://www.richardsaltoun.com/artists/281-berni-searle/biography/. (stellenboschtriennale.com)
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA). (2025). Exhibitions & events / About Zeitz MOCAA. Retrieved October 2025, from https://zeitzmocaa.museum/ and https://zeitzmocaa.museum/exhibitions-and-events/. (zeitzmocaa.museum)