Back to the future in photographs

Louise Liebenberg and Stanford Slabbert in 1996

While going through my old press pictures taken for the likes of The Herald, Weekend Post and Evening Post in the mid-1990s, I came across the faces of some of the people I had photographed during those years. Back then all the photographs had been taken with my Nikon FM2 and F5 film cameras… how things have changed in the last decade and a half!

Sometimes I ask myself what could have happened to all the people I had met and photographed during those years as a freelance press photographer. And so, with my iPhone 4 in hand I decided to track down some of these subjects and photograph them again – this time using a radically different medium.

This lot would have probably laughed at me 15 to 20 years ago, had I hauled out a cellphone (brick!) and said I was going to take their picture with this device. Now it’s the other way around. Many of the young people born after film had largely vanished would now look at me somewhat strangely if I told them to hang on a moment while I loaded a film in my camera with which to photograph them!

Photography is the most practised pastime in the world, whether you’re doing it professionally or for fun. Digital photography has opened up so many possibilities to the man in the street compared to the limitations that came with photography in the past.

I believe the reason why photography is so popular world wide is that it gives people a sense of immortality; images are a record of your doings and your history on this earth which will serve as a record for future generations. In a way photographs are one way in which we can all live forever.

Photography also introduced me to Louise Liebenberg, who is now my wife, and so I decided to start off this little project with a picture I took of her towards the end of 1996, possibly even in early 1997, when she and Stanford Slabbert were both still working for Tourism PE; Louise as the media liaison officer and Stanford as the events and watersports guru. Stanford today is a city councillor while Louise is assistant editor of Weekend Post.

This week I took the two of them back to the historic Donkin Reserve where Tourism PE’s offices had been based and where I had photographed them all those years ago. But this time, to Stanford’s amazement, I captured the image on my iPhone. I even processed it there and then using the apps available on the phone.

Louise and Stanford in 2012

No longer did I have to rush back to the darkroom, trying to beat the deadline and hoping  the film had been exposed properly and that nothing would have gone awry in the chemical process.

Over the next few months I invite you to join me as I track down some of the personalities in PE that I had the privilege to photograph over the years while freelancing at the papers.