Major highs
Alice Mann’s project on South Africa’s ‘drummies’ community is the first series to win the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. She speaks to Amy Davies
Despite winning the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, 27-year-old South African photographer Alice Mann is incredibly humble. When AP meets her at the press view of this year’s awards – the morning after she found out she’d won the £15,000 prize – it’s clear that the news was still sinking in.
Sneaking off to a quiet corner of the National Portrait Gallery to answer some of our questions, the enthusiasm she has for the subjects of her prize-winning series, Drummies, is infectious. It’s fascinating to watch her speak with such eloquence about the project, which depicts South Africa’s all-female drum majorette community. Many of her subjects come from the country’s most marginalised communities.
‘I think, for me, being a South African photographer, I’m very aware of the stereotypes which are reiterated a lot,’ she explains. ‘I kind of try to challenge that and present alternate ideas. I think, especially South African women, are often shown as victims and lacking agency. These young women and girls are very, very selfempowered – they’re incredibly confident. I wanted to focus on that, to show another side of South Africa.’
Describing herself as ‘a bit of a detective’, Mann finds her subjects through a mixture of word of mouth, cold- calling and following competitions and teams on Facebook. ‘ When it works best is when I have a sense of engagement from speaking to people – you can sense when they’re actually interested. I really want people to like what I’m doing and want to work with me.’
The images in the series may look staged, but in fact, Mann prefers to let her subjects be as free as possible. ‘I like people to feel that there’s a space [in which] they can act how they want, towards me and the camera. I try and facilitate a space where they feel comfortable to do that, and where they feel like there’s a sort of trust in what I’m doing. You would be struck by how amazing these girls are. They have so much energy and you can really see when they put on the uniform, their body language changes and they feel amazing and have such a positive energy. I felt very honoured to be around them.’ The overall project features more than 120 images, with Mann working on the project for several months. ‘I like to work over a long period of time,’ Mann says. ‘It’s important that I have a relationship with my subjects. Also as a white photographer working in South Africa, I need to show sustained engagement, and for me to work to facilitate that.’
Narrowing down more than 120 images to the fi nal four required for entering the Taylor Wessing competition wasn’t quite as challenging as you might assume. ‘I’m portrait obsessed – I used to only do portraits. I started expanding my narrative to include documentary because I think it enables a story to be translated a little bit more. These images were special to me – especially the little girls; I had such a cool relationship with them.’
Unbelievably, Mann almost didn’t enter the competition this year with her series. ‘Another photographer whose work I very much respect encouraged me to enter. I enter for a lot of grants and so on – it forces you to be able to write and talk about your work. I was a bit in awe of the judge line- up, too. Obviously this is way more than I could have hoped for – I thought I was just in the exhibition.
‘I don’t feel I’ve done anything particularly special – it’s just what I’ve always done. For me, the nicest thing is that I feel like I’ve successfully translated the kind of respect and admiration I had for these young girls, and now other people can see that too.’
The day after our meeting, Mann was due to fly out to Johannesburg to shoot more images for the project. Ultimately, she hopes to turn her series into a book one day. ‘I feel like it would be a kind of nice physical object, in recognition of the girls I worked with. I guess everyone wants to make a book, but you only get one first book, so I want to make sure that it’s done properly.’
See Alice Mann’s winning images, along with the other winning and shortlisted images, at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 27 January 2019.