Tag: Alexia Webster

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.

For as long as Alexia Webster can remember, she has visited Hogsback with her family at least once a year, driving nine hours from their home in Johannesburg to a cluster of cabins her great-grandfather built nearly a century ago. To a young child, Hogsback was a mystical place full of ancient trees and twisted foliage, like something out of a J. R. R. Tolkien novel. In fact, Hogsback has often been misidentified as Tolkien’s inspiration for “Lord of the Rings.”