Deseni Soobben Artist Talk

Forced Removals: Newslands, Durban, 1985

Deseni Soobben teaches Photojournalism in the Journalism Programme at Durban University of Technology. Whilst studying Photography at DUT, she photographed sports events for The Graphic newspaper. Soobben then joined the Afrapix Collective with Cedric Nunn, Rafs Mayet, Omar Badsha and Paul Weinberg, to name a few. She also worked at the Durban City Press Office alongside Sbu Mngadi and Fred Khumalo, travelling and covering the political and social scenes of KZN. More recently Soobben’s documentary work has been exhibited at artSPACE Gallery, at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Between States of Emergency exhibition and at the Tate Museum in London. The talk will be part of launching the African Documentary Photography Archive Initiative (ADPAI).

African Documentary Photography Archive Initiative (ADPAI)

ADPAI is a project of Art for Humanity, hosted at the Faculty of Art and Design, Durban University of Technology (DUT). The project exists to meet the overwhelming need to digitize and make available the images of African documentary photographers, especially those who emerged in the 1980s and produced images of that all-important decade of transition in Southern Africa. Many of these photographers were independent or worked in collectives and agencies which were independent. Their negatives (produced in analogue format in a pre-digital age, and a few prints) are largely not scanned and thus unavailable electronically, ensuring that these important images are not in the national and global memory and consciousness.