In the early 1980s, Paul Weinberg made several low-budget films on Super 8 stock. These were The Dark City, with the youth organisation Khauleza, about Alexandra township north of Johannesburg; and Part of the Process, with Harriet Gavshon, about the demolition of Pageview, a residential area near the Johannesburg inner city which was largely inhabited by Indian people. Both were shown at history workshops of the University of the Witwatersrand.

Paul’s interest in film has resurfaced. Recent videos include Dancing for God, about the annual Shembe Church pilgrimage in KwaZulu-Natal; Trancing in Dreamtime’ with Junaid Ahmed, about interaction between San and Aboriginal musicians; and Double Vision, with Karin Shapiro, about the South African diaspora in North Carolina in the United States.

For nearly three decades, Paul Weinberg has travelled to Namibia, Botswana and South Africa to document the lives of hunter-gatherer communities, the San (Africa’s first people) and their struggles to hang on to their land, culture, and values, as they faced serious threats by outside settlers. Weinberg will discuss his book Traces and Tracks (Jacana Media 2017), the culmination of his thirty-year journey, featuring essays and over 100 photographs that convey the modern-day San’s daily lives, their relationship to nature, game parks, and their ways of adjusting to a fast-changing world.

This video is one in a series of interviews with South African photographers about photography and democracy here – then and now.