PAUL WEINBERG: Between the cracks: A career retrospective exhibition, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg

This special collection offers a candid retrospective of his personal and professional journey, testimony to the extraordinariness of ordinary humanity, captured by a photographer whose deep personal engagement informs every frame. It traces his path from the streets of Johannesburg in the late 1970s to the contemporary landscapes of rural South Africa. These images revive the overlooked moments of our social and historical past, and the everyday people who shaped it.

A three-decade visual anthropology of the San people of Southern Africa. Rejecting exoticized or romanticised portrayals, Weinberg documents their contemporary lives, struggles over land rights, and cultural continuity in the face of displacement and change. This long-term project combines deep research with sustained relationships, offering a nuanced, empathetic portrait of Africa’s first people.

An exploration of spirituality across diverse cultural and religious traditions, Weinberg explores rituals, and gatherings, observing how spiritual practice transcends divisions of race, class, and creed. His photographs emphasise connection, openness, and shared humanity, portraying the sacred spaces, beyond the everyday, where the material and spiritual intersect.

This project, a sequel to Moving Spirit, explores how people have long marked and celebrated their spiritual connections to our contested land in ways that signify and re-imagine what it means for a variety of its inhabitants. Such landscape images of meaning-making and land marking are etched in the landscape, turning it into a natural canvass through which layered stories, manifest or buried, are expressed.

A vivid, on-the-ground record of South Africa’s first democratic elections. Weinberg captures the scale, diversity, and emotion of the moment – from long voting queues and joyous celebrations to quieter scenes of civic participation. The work is both a historic document and a testament to collective endurance, marking the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy.

As Tamar Garb notes in her foreword to the publication, at the heart of Weinberg’s work is “the body and consciousness of the photographer” – a self-reflective approach that questions his relationship to his subjects and resists the exoticisation of marginalised communities. His images are grounded in the lives of ordinary people, often during the most difficult of times, and reveal resilience, solidarity, and moments of joy within oppressive conditions.

“Photography became an integral part of how I saw the world; it gave me a passport to travel across the divides that were so prevalent at the time. I embarked on all sorts of journeys off the beaten track. But it was the people I was looking at –how they danced with reality, how they found light in the darkness, and how they embraced each other, even at great risk.

– Paul Weinberg

With special thanks to our partners and collaborators:

Wits Art Museum · RMB Latitudes · Blackman Rossouw