Yatou Sallah: Bandile, tell me a bit about yourself and the work you do at the Market Photo Workshop.
Bandile Gumbi: My name is Bandile Gumbi, I’m the head of the Market Photo Workshop, which is a photography institution in Johannesburg, South Africa. We do training in photography and visual storytelling through formal classes as well as community-based projects: blending industry access through our trainers, as well as access to the technical skills needed for photographic training. But really we are a space that fosters conversation about story, visual narrative, and industry networks.
We’ve been around since 1989, which is quite an achievement.
YS: Absolutely! In September, the Market Photo Workshop will be showcasing World Press Photo’s 70th anniversary exhibition, What Have We Done? The exhibition has been developed with the purpose of examining the organization's archives with fresh eyes, and engaging in a reflective dialogue about what has been shown, how it has been represented, and what has been left out. How do you feel this exhibition resonates with the overarching mission of the Market Photo Workshop?
BG: I think this exhibition is more than a showcase, but really a point of departure for many discussions around the medium of photojournalism. Looking at what is going to be shown, you quickly realize who is missing as a witness. It’s not necessarily only about who or what has been witnessed, but also who the witness is. This becomes quite apparent and informs the legacy of World Press Photo. It’s a reflection point in history, and it's important for the Market Photo Workshop to be one of the spaces that shape the narrative going forward, by fostering discussions about the stories that are missing.
From an African perspective, we have a history of visual storytelling, and there are many photojournalists practicing today, but access is a big issue. Whether that access is based on capacity building or just access to opportunities to be a nominated photographer, or to be the winner of internationally recognized prizes like World Press Photo’s. So this question of access is part of our excitement about hosting the exhibition as well as showcasing a history of this particular genre that we operate within.
YS: This exhibition is not solely a presentation, but also marks a moment where we are encouraging people to participate in a reflective dialogue around what it means for these historical images to be unearthed from the archive, brought to the public, and framed in this way.
How do you see the exhibition and its side events—including a pop-up photography festival—contributing to the ethos of curiosity, critique, and reflection that is nurtured between both of our organizations?
BG: Firstly, it's meaningful that the exhibition will reach far beyond the traditional community and audience of the Market Photo Workshop. We have generations of photojournalists operating in South Africa, as well as many young photojournalists who are our students and alumni. However, by virtue of the gallery space being public-facing—in downtown Johannesburg with high traffic of people who have nothing to do with photography—people will have the chance to engage with the images and conversations surrounding them with fresh eyes.
And when it comes to our students and trainers, they will engage with the exhibition through conversations that will enrich how we look at our own training, getting us to think about how we talk about faraway places. Within that conversation, there is an opportunity to find common ground as well as disparity. We can find commonalities in terms of practice and the content of the visuals. It's meaningful that we can travel through time in the archival exhibition to reflect on our own approaches as practitioners. To think in terms of what other people are doing, and have been doing for 70 years. For us to see shifts, but also consistencies, as a learning process.
It's really a thinking thing: thinking about seeing. These images might feel like something that doesn't belong in the space, that they are foreign images. But it's a chance to think about how the images are familiar in terms of the lived realities of some of our audience. I think with both the broader Johannesburg society and our photographic community, the exhibition is going to resonate and click, and cause reflection, and maybe get some people annoyed in the process. This is part of the whole process of being critical about your space in the world, and critical about what you see. I think there will be really interesting engagements around that and takeaways on how to look and how to be seen.
Through public programming, I think that practitioners will start to see the World Press Photo Contest as something that is accessible to them, too. I'm hoping that through this programming, a whole lot of people will start applying to enter the 2026 Contest.
These are all reasons why I think it's very important to have the exhibition here.
YS: As a former photojournalist, the exhibition’s curator, Cristina de Middel, reflects on the question of how we bring people back to photojournalism, and how we make them care again. Through the exhibition, she begins to answer that question by raising new ones. She writes:
“Maybe journalism needs to change its approach. What if, instead of just presenting the facts as cold, unquestionable truths, it encouraged curiosity? What if, instead of dictating the narrative, it asked more questions? What if it invited the audience to think, to doubt, to form their own opinions instead of forcing them into ideological trenches?”
The imagery in What Have We Done? spans 70 years of photojournalism, images that have not only documented history but have actively shaped how the world is seen and understood.
In the African context, many of these representations have influenced how the continent itself is perceived, both by others and from within. Why is it so important to ask questions about our approach to presenting history as it unfolds? And how long-standing patterns of representation shaped the ways African photographers today tell stories and choose how to share them with the world?
BG: These patterns have been very influential. In many ways, we learn from and reference those who have done it before us.
When you’re referencing, who are you referencing? This indicates how you see yourself. Institutionally, the Market Photo Workshop tries to be very critical in this sense. Historically, we are a space of disturbance—a space opened for those who were not allowed to study photography, to do so here. Not in some outlying, marginal place far from where the center was at the time. Shifting those boundaries has been uncomfortable. It’s a strange thing: how we train and who we are as a photo workshop.
Now, taking this body of work curated by De Middel and putting it within this space, there will always be some form of critical engagement. We’re not going to shy away from how perceptions of Africa have been documented—and how everyone on the continent, in one way or another, is influenced by that, whether they critique it or emulate it. Maybe the conversation should be: what exactly are you emulating, or what exactly are you critiquing—and what does that look like? I think that’s what’s missing.
These images do exist; they’re just not widely shared in spaces where we engage in conversation about format, style, and narrative. Indeed, the same image needs to be read by different people to produce different perspectives. Or maybe it needs to be curated differently, in a new context, so that its meaning, or the way it is seen and read, shifts. I feel that will happen with the exhibition, whether or not it’s intentional from the curator. Simply by being in another space, it will be seen differently.
You can’t dismiss the value, technicality, and beauty of the work being shown. But the key issue will always be who is telling the story, more than what the story is.
YS: What responsibility do you think institutions have in addressing unequal legacies of access—who gets to tell which stories—and of narrative—how stories have been framed through visual elements? And how do you see the archive helping to work through these issues?
BG: Archives are always tricky spaces to operate within. They're very difficult spaces to work in because you’re dealing with histories of pain or rejection. Within our context and our reading in South Africa, the space of archives is always problematic. But at the same time, there’s a movement towards an appreciation of history at the same time as its problems. And institutions are spaces to reflect on this, all of it: the good, the bad, the ugly, the uncomfortable. But this has to be framed honestly, framed in a way that is not necessarily offensive. We can be offended by it, but we mustn't be offensive.
An institution is a space of support to have discussions about things that are uncomfortable—if they want to take up the challenge. They are the custodians of what has been made, and what will be made in the future, especially those institutions that have been around a long time. So, the process of circling back to reflection in relation to whatever the current is, is a big part of how they operate.
YS: Could you speak more to the pathways that open up between the archive and work that will be made in the future?
BG: I think once we’re able to talk about it—whatever “it” is, maybe a physical thing like an image—and reflect on it, whatever you create from that becomes part of its lineage. Whether direct or indirect, you can see this here at the Photo Workshop, where we have photographers who are just legacy, legacy, legacy, and you see it in students' work without them having to explain it. You see it in their practice, you see it in so many things. You can trace who has been engaging with whose work.
The archive holds that space. The more you engage with it, the more you learn from it—whether that means learning to disagree with it or finding a way to have a conversation with it as a visual storyteller. And access is a big part of that. The more we can see the archive—not just in passing, but through deep engagement and absorption—when you can really sit with it, that’s when you start to see its influence in the work produced afterward, especially within a teaching institute, for instance.
YS: As you’re saying this, I’m picturing a process of layering—like soil—where meaning is compounded over time. Similarly, the exhibition presents layers upon layers of work that have been awarded over the past 70 years, shaped by different juries and award cycles.
De Middel pulls out the recurring patterns that are visible across the layers of over 15,000 images in the archive. These include, but are not limited to: weeping women and men rescuing; soldiers and debris; silhouettes and shadows, and the ‘wow’ moment; and black skin and the dark continent. These visual codes can shape how the world is understood and represented in the future.
Thinking about emerging practitioners, how can photographers learn from these patterns, and the ways they evoke empathy, while also charting new paths forward that avoid replacing old patterns with new but equally limiting ones?
BG: It's a tricky one because it’s not just a photography thing—it’s a thinking thing, a society thing, a grounding and background thing. Media in its broadest form shapes how we see the world, and that’s how these patterns end up forming. The photographer often just witnesses it—either because they’ve internalized those patterns or because that’s what they believe they can see. So, it’s really a broader education issue. And it’s hard to say how, in South Africa right now or anywhere else, we can shift that perspective besides changing how society operates and changing what it is we see.
We’re a community-engaged space, and a lot of photography here—depending on where people are coming from—focuses on documenting social issues. Often, it is the people running from tear gas. It is crying mothers. But sometimes the shift happens in who is looking, who is witnessing. That changes the thinking.
Images that showcase poverty, for instance, are everywhere. But again, it comes back to: who is telling the story? People need to tell their own stories, and sometimes their stories do look like this—you can’t run away from that. The question is, how do we talk about it when it’s framed by someone embedded in the community versus someone who flew in for a day and a half to do a feature?
And what happens when they both take the same image? It’s an uneasy conversation because the story might be the same, but the storyteller changes the meaning.
In terms of evoking empathy, we can always learn new approaches. There’s a thin line between over-aestheticizing something and being poetic about a situation from a place of empathy. And in that moment, you’re shaping the narrative—the verbal and written narrative—trying to create something between the two. Sometimes those visual codes get crossed, and as a viewer, you’re not sure what you’re actually looking at or where it comes from.
When it comes to visual language, I don't know, maybe it will evolve as people learn, through practice, what not to do, and what that really means. Because something might be developed as a beautiful aesthetic style for one photographer with no intention of creating a blockbuster, 'wow’ effect… but for someone else, it might simply be an emulation.
YS: In 2025, even after the introduction of our regional contest model, only 5.9% of entrants were African.
How do regional partnerships like the one between the Market Photo Workshop and World Press Photo support African visual storytellers to overcome regional constraints and gain access to wider global audiences through the contest?
BG: Partnerships are key to the work that we do, and the partnership with World Press Photo is important for us in a couple of ways. First, it helps to build understanding: we know the challenges on the continent around capacity building and access, and this partnership opens doors for African photographers. It opened doors for us too, to other parts of the continent we hadn't fully engaged with at all before, which feeds back into our knowledge. And hopefully, allows us to share what we've learned as an institution with more photographers who want to engage with us.
World Press Photo has facilitated this, which is amazing for us because that's how we want to grow.
And I'm assuming that this partnership with us as one of your African partners is great for you to build closer relationships with photographers and visual storytellers on the continent. Through this partnership, we can do the groundwork to explain: this is the space, this is what it offers, and this is how you can engage with it. Demystifying the prize, the organization, and access is the most important part.
There is an aspiration to participate in the contest, but it is limited by people thinking that they're not up to scratch. Many people overlook big institutions and think, I don't think I can reach that. That's why we need to demystify what it takes to reach that space and what it takes to be recognized there without it feeling unreachable. So bringing it closer to home helps to create that mental bridge, because often it's a mental gap, not even a physical one, since it's an online application.
Once people are applying locally, then it has the potential to become a ritual. Once the conversation happens from a local space and voice explaining how the process works, it stops feeling so out of reach. South Africa has a long history of photojournalism, and there is an understanding of what it is. But there are also places in the region and on the continent at large, where there is a greater need and also a hunger for such platforms.
Making it part of the conversation makes it easier for people to engage with.
Additionally, the more that the archive evolves, the easier it is to engage with the organization. When you want to apply and you start doing research about past winners, shortlists, and jury members, the more representative all of these things are, the more accessible it will feel. It's really a step-by-step process.
