Paul Weinberg’s Between the Cracks: a quiet revolution

“The camera was a way to understand my country and learn about the world around me,” veteran South African photojournalist Paul Weinberg told radio journalist John Perlman on Sunday, 6 July, at Tova Café at Beit Emanuel in Parktown.

They were discussing the launch of Weinberg’s latest book, Between the Cracks, which portrays his life documenting southern Africa’s overlooked communities, forgotten landscapes, and moments of quiet humanity.

Weinberg, a filmmaker, writer, archivist, and photographer, has spent more than four decades capturing South Africa’s social and environmental realities. A founding member of the influential Afrapix collective – a progressive photographers’ collective and photographic agency – in the 1980s, Weinberg has always aligned his lens with the marginalised. His work defies traditional news photography by dwelling on the subtle, the spiritual, and the soulful.

“Photography became an integral part of how I saw the world,” he said. “It gave me a passport to travel across the divides. I embarked on all sorts of journeys off the beaten track.”

Between the Cracks is a retrospective collection that spans Weinberg’s work from the 1970s to the present. The book brings together black-and-white and colour photographs, organised thematically. Weinberg said this reflected his ongoing dialogue between past and present, as a poetic conversation where memory and reflection take precedence over linear storytelling.

Weinberg said he chose the book’s title from his belief in documenting lives and places that exist outside of dominant narratives. “Between the cracks, life continues with its pain and joy,” he said. “During the ‘dark days’, apartheid shadowed me on all these journeys. But it was the people I was looking at – watching how they reflected themselves and how I absorbed their reflections; how they danced with reality; how they made light in a dark space; how they embraced each other at great risk.”

This insight reveals the dual role that Weinberg sees himself playing in his photography in being both witness and participant. He told how he was conscripted into the apartheid army, yet turned his camera against the system. “We were unashamedly partisan and saw the camera as a weapon against the system,” he said. He focused on capturing what the government and mainstream media either ignored or suppressed. His work with Afrapix was deliberately political because he believed “to photograph was to resist”.

Reflecting on his career to date, Weinberg described himself as a “reluctant war photographer”. Frontline conflict photography was never his default approach, he said, and he wouldn’t necessarily have joined the Bang Bang Club, a group of photojournalists who made their names by photographing political violence. But, like many South Africans drawn to activism, he felt the pull to document the country’s unrest because of the political climate, not as a result of a desire for dramatic imagery.

With Perlman, Weinberg recounted the funeral of Chief Ampie Mayisa after his assassination by vigilantes in 1986. Weinberg said he arrived at the funeral after a man suspected of being one of the vigilantes involved was attacked and killed. Weinberg, who took the photograph that was then published on the front page of the Mail & Guardian, previously known as the Weekly Mail, advised against its publication, saying that he feared that it might lead to arrests and executions by the security police. The situation underscored the ethical complexity and dilemmas of his work, he said, in which capturing a moment could have life-or-death consequences.

Ultimately, Weinberg said he didn’t want the photograph to be used because he saw it as exploiting violence for imagery. He noted that photography, like writing, always involves more than just the main event. “There are often backstories and side narratives that are even more compelling.”

Yet, Weinberg said, Between the Cracks is far more than a catalogue of protest. It’s a study in persistence, intimacy, and everyday life. “He wanted to tell the story that wasn’t being told,” Perlman said. This, Perlman said, was clear in the images of funeral processions, spiritual gatherings, quiet commutes, and rural rituals images that don’t scream, but whisper with humanity.

Weinberg described arriving in Johannesburg as a young man as an “incredible experience”. He spoke of a project called Going Home that he worked on with fellow photographer Santu Mofokeng, a close friend and fellow Afrapix member. “We were exactly the same age,” Weinberg recalled, “and we became very close.”

Going Home for them was born out of their routine on Friday afternoons – Mofokeng going back to Soweto, and Weinberg initially to Yeoville, where he was staying, although his real home was Pietermaritzburg. They documented what “home” meant to them. From 1986 to 1989, Mofokeng photographed Soweto, producing some of his most iconic work, while Weinberg returned to Pietermaritzburg to explore his roots through the lens.

The cover of Between the Cracks is a photo from that series taken on Church Street in the city centre of Pietermaritzburg. Weinberg said the image represented a “liminal space” – a feeling of being caught in between – during a time when apartheid was at its most brutal. “We were just trying to find ourselves and work it all out,” he said, reflecting on the uncertain but transformative nature of that period.

He said he preferred spontaneous photography to staged images to document events. He came from the tradition of catching moments as they happened quickly, really, and full of unplanned meaning. “The trick was to get that spontaneous picture that had an explosion, something with impact,” he said. “[The cover of his book] was one of those moments.” It was, as he put it, a real, unscripted moment that speaks volumes, and was the kind of photograph Weinberg spent his lifetime pursuing.

Weinberg said that due to the era and the pre-digital equipment he was using, he often didn’t know whether he had captured the moment until much later. This uncertainty, paired with intention and trust, is part of what gives the book its meditative quality. “I was just very conscious, every time I took a photograph, I had to make it work. Every picture had to count. I had to get the decisive moment. I had to try and do my best.”