The Market Photo Workshop in partnership with The Tierney Family Foundation is excited to announce Kabelo Mokoena as the 12th recipient of the Tierney Fellowship at the Market Photo Workshop. The Tierney Fellowship enables an ideal platform for an emerging photographer to successfully conceptualize, develop and produce a body of work of photography. The Fellowship provides the successful applicant with the financial support necessary to research and produce a body of photography work, in consultation with an appointed mentor of the recipient’s preference, over a period of a year. The Tierney Fellowship programme ran for the first time in South Africa in 2008 and partner institutions include the Market Photo Workshop, WITS School of Arts and The Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
The Tierney Fellowship builds on other Market Photo Workshop platforms geared towards a South Africa where photography plays an important part in the development of careers and the development of photography.
The selection of the 12th Tierney Fellow adhered to a thorough selection process with an expert panel of judges, which comprised of Matthew Tierney, Andrew Tshabangu, Kabelo Malatsie, Tsepo Gumbi and Jerry Vezzuso.
Andrew Tshabangu, a distinguished South African photographer and practitioner, will mentor Mokoena.
About Kabelo Mokoena
Kabelo Mokena was born in in 1995 in Soweto, Johannesburg. In 2015, Mokoena successfully completed the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Programme at Market Photo Workshop. In the same year, he interned at The Times as a photographer. In 2017 he joined the Sowetan newspaper. He has published and exhibited locally.
Mokoena’s work for the Tierney Fellowship documents the lives of people living on the outskirts of urban areas and depicts their rural way of life in these urban spaces. The work will explore the lifestyle of these individuals who mostly migrated from neighbouring countries such as Botswana, Lesotho or relocated from South African rural areas to settle on the periphery of townships like Soweto.
Mokoena commented, “The story of “The Outskirts” is important to me, because I feel it speaks for those who are voiceless. It shows their living conditions and how people go to extreme measures in order to have a better life. The Tierney Fellowship will give me the opportunity to explore this project in detail. It will allow me the chance to be mentored by practitioners with experience in photography and storytelling.”
About the mentor, Andrew Tshabangu
Andrew Tshabangu was born in 1966 in Soweto, Johannesburg, where he currently works and lives. His lifelong visual subject is the city and its satellite township on the southwest frontier of the African megalopolis. Tshabangu studied photography in the Eastern part of the city, at the Alexandra Community Art Centre, in 1990; he later studied photojournalism at the Institute of Advancement for Journalism, shortly in the wake of the new democratic dispensation. He would go on to make his name as a photojournalist mainly at the then-exulted New Nation, an alternative weekly published by the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
Andrew Tshabangu has been making photographs for over twenty years. He has traversed the city and the countryside—in South Africa and elsewhere—with an ease born of deep familiarity and empathy, and in order to show everyday lives made meaningful by the rhythms of work, faith and leisure.
Andrew Tshabangu’s two decades-plus visual repertoire, the best of which was showcased at Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery and Gallery MOMO in Footprints, is provocative and ultimately liberating. With its exploration of blackness as a lived, if banal and mundane experience (just as it is with any other racial group), Footprints, which was curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe, is also notable for its simplicity and aching, often sweeping quietness, and clarity.
Sources:
Aperture: The Unsung Hero of South African Photography
Fourthwall Books: Andrew Tshabangu: Footprints
About The Tierney Fellowship
The Tierney Fellowship was created in 2003 by The Tierney Family Foundation to support emerging artists in the field of photography. The primary goal of the Fellowship is to find tomorrow’s distinguished artists and leaders in the world of photography and assist them in overcoming the challenges that a photographer faces at the beginning of his or her career.
The Tierney Fellowship programme ran for the first time in South Africa in 2008 and partner institutions include the Market Photo Workshop, WITS School of Arts and The Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. The aim of the fellowship is twofold: encouraging fellows to produce a new body of work and creating a global community of artists that functions as a crucial support network in an increasingly competitive field. The Fellowship supports the recipients both financially, by way of a grant, and technically and conceptually, with mentorship and guidance from experts in the field.
Fellows remain an important part of the programme after the conclusion of their structured mentorship. Seminars and critiques are held throughout the year to facilitate interaction between all current and past recipients, encouraging discussion about their photography, work experience and lives as artists.
See Tierney Info: Home Page for more information
About the Market Photo Workshop
For 30 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. World-renowned photographer David Goldblatt contributed vastly to the establishment of Market Photo Workshop in 1988 - 1999. Since then, 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. In 2016, Market Photo Workshop relocated to its new state of art photography facility at Market Square premises by the Mary Fitzgerald Square.
Market Photo Workshop is the recipient of The Principal Prince Claus Award 2018.
For more information, please contact:
Market Photo Workshop
c/o Market Square
138 Lilian Ngoyi St
Entrance at Margaret Macingana Street
Newtown
Johannesburg
info@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
