Photographs have long been treated as evidence. Someone was there, something happened and the camera captured it.
Today, that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
An image can be edited, generated, cropped or stripped of its original context before it reaches us. On social media, a photograph can travel thousands of kilometres while the story attached to it quietly changes along the way.
We may be looking at the same picture but no longer looking at the same truth.
It is this uneasy territory that the second Cape Town Photography Festival will explore from 2 to 26 September, across venues around the city.
The question has particular resonance in Cape Town, where photographs have long documented the city’s changing communities and political history.
From images of forced removals under apartheid to photographs preserving the traditions of communities such as the Cape Malay and Cape Minstrels, photography has played a role in recording how the city has changed and how its people have been remembered.
“Photography has long been trusted as evidence, but today images can be easily manipulated, re-contextualised and weaponised,” says festival director Heidi Erdmann.
Rather than offering audiences a checklist for deciding which images are true, the festival wants them to examine how truth is constructed around a photograph.
That idea runs through a programme that has doubled in size since the inaugural edition, bringing together 40 exhibitions and more than 160 photographers.
In the Company’s Garden, “Cape Rhythm: Goema, Klopse & Memory” explores the relationship between photography, Cape Town’s musical traditions and cultural memory.
The festival also looks beyond South Africa, with work from Réunion Island offering perspectives from across the Indian Ocean, while Nairobi-based PICHA Stock, a platform focused on photography and visual storytelling, will lead practical workshops during the festival.
The International Student Photography Exhibition adds an emerging voice to the programme, offering a glimpse at the photographers who will shape the medium’s future.
New venues including the Castle of Good Hope and Company’s Garden also bring photography outside the conventional gallery, while talks, screenings, demonstrations and guided walks encourage audiences to consider not only what photographs show but how they are made.
“We live in a world saturated with images,” Erdmann says.
The festival asks audiences to do something increasingly rare: stop, look and question what they are seeing.
bernelee.vollmer@nationalmg.co.za