Why SA woman is world’s most decorated photographer

YOU’D never think Jodi Bieber was one of the most decorated photographers on earth. This isn’t because of her output. The picture which earned her the World Press Photo of the Year in 2010 is probably one that many of us have fixed deepest in the mind of all the major international images published over the past decade.

Bieber restored Bibi Aisha – whose nose her husband and his family had hacked off when she tried to escape being abused in her home in Afghanistan – to a rare, frightening beauty on the cover of Time Magazine. And although the image was used as a means to discuss what would happen if the US pulled out of that country, the generous, if disturbing, beauty which Bieber found in the 18-yearold’s mutilated face became a catastrophic epic condemning the destruction brought by men.

The photographer – who started her career covering the 1994 elections for The Star after attending courses at The Market Photography Workshop in Joburg – had already found magnetic work on many other global assignments. But that picture shifted her place in a contested expanse of talent.

The reason you wouldn’t think she is as important as she is is because Bieber – who now lives back in Joburg by choice, after years in London and Paris – is so reachable and responsive. It’s also because the work she chooses to do grabs her by her shoulders and shakes her. It’s what’s in her conscience, what pesters her head.

She has had particular success photographing women, and her most comprehensive and at times witty collection of such images is Real Beauty, which came out in book form in 2014. In it, she told everyday stories about all sorts of bodies, in bras and panties, high heels and bare feet, pearls and tender flesh.

It’s rare to see a Bieber portrait at large, but there has been one from the book on exhibition at the SoMa Art + Space, a Maboneng gallery with a groove like a slide guitar. It’s up above the Lenin Vodka Bar, which is a mixtape of Joburg’s

Captured beauty of Afghan abuse victim’s horror

happiest nightlife.

The gallery presented One Night in No Man’s Land this weekend, with the work of Bieber and nine other women artists, plus a tribute to the one who still riles, upends and mystifies us the most: Brenda Fassie.

That came in a conversation with superlative Joburg writer Bongani Madondo, who wrote in and edited the Brenda book, Not Your Weekend Special, and authored the recent release Sigh the Beloved Country, which takes on South Africa’s famous like a lion-tamer at a circus.

That tribute was complemented by a rare showing of one of the most fearless photographs we’ve seen of Brenda, taken by Sally Shorkend for Vrye Weekblad in the mid-1990s. In it, the photographer finds the artist’s humour and youth, but also her dirt and solace, pictured as she was smoking on her bed in a room in Joburg.

Shorkend – who also showed an electric portrait of Winnie Mandela – put together the night at SoMa, creating a scene which our city once needed and now loves.

It’s a distinctive young gallery in a repolished district where people meet over talent, have drinks and feel a sense of hyperbolic excitement as if they were in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Berlin. It’s easier to be cynical, but still this rush happens.

It showed how a world star like Bieber could warmly share a space with young artists, in this case all women in the form of Audrey Anderson, Fleur de Bondt, Zanele Mashinini, Lebohang Motaung, Jenny Nijenhuis, Nompumelelo Ngoma and Roberta Rich, under the curatorship of Teboho Ralesai.

Anderson’s work alone was worth seeing. She built women’s never-ending expectations of men into exquisite weavers’ nests imprinted on wood panels. Some of the work from No Man’s Land can now be seen in SoMa’s retail space.

Bieber’s work, meanwhile, gets more rooted in the memory with every chance like this to see it.