South Africa Week: Alexia Webster | LENSCRATCH

Alexia Webster’s Street Studio project began in 2011 and in the years since she has photographed thousands of sitters across the African continent and beyond. Though the project represents a departure from her personal and professional work, the series aligns with a direction she sees her work heading in the future. “I’m interested in having work that’s a conversation between the me and the subject,” she says. Webster’s engagement project also reflects an impulse common to many South African photographers: to push the boundaries of the medium as a tool for transforming society. “Photography in South Africa,” Webster says, is always having a slightly different conversation than any other photographic space in the world. We grapple with things quite intensely — ideas of self and identity and place and politics and memory — and the photography does the same.