Retha Ferguson is a Cape Town based photographer interested in ways to visually understand the world through place, identity and history. She has been a prolific documentary photographer since 2009, and has exhibited in South Africa, Lesotho, Georgia and France. Her work ranges from portraiture, to candid street shots and abstract shape and colour. Rather than formalistically limiting herself, she chooses to focus on themes and locations and uses diverse visual modes to capture the mood of an idea or place. She is currently pursuing her masters degree in visual history at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her masters project concerns the history of Voortrekker Road as a site of fractured negotiation within South Africa as a transitional society, and approaches the topic through a multidisciplinary filmic approach.
How We Lived For Saturdays – Killarney
How We Lived For Saturdays is a contemplation on the ways in which leisure time is digested in post revolutionary and transitional societies. The relationship between freedom from and freedom to is used as a starting point, to consider the process by which the search for self determination is a continuous endeavour never readily delivered by democratic transitions. Free time is explored as a transitory moment in which the hopes, dreams, disappointments of freedom can be expressed in a moment of temporal autonomy. In the Killarney project specific attention is paid to masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa, and how it is expressed on weekends through Cape Town’s drag racing culture.
To view more of Retha’s work please visit her website.