Against everyone’s expectations, in South Africa, I didn’t take a single photo of Kruger Park. The best a wildlife I could photograph with my temper could be animals’ bums running toward the horizon. Instead, I shot industrial landscapes and called it IRON AFRICA. Alliance France organized an exhibition of my photo series.

On my first days in South Africa, I grub my Nikon and jumped into the husband’s car when he was going to visit a few mines for his business. Working and engineering folks had no idea what I was shooting at their dusty and oily interiors but I was totally amazed with this stuff. https://www.youtube.com/embed/1PPQuCkNYxE

I somehow got an email about the International Photo Contest and replied with a couple of the iron still lives to them. I won an African Regional contest and was offered to make a personal exhibition. I did it my way. I went to our local fruit shop and ask 40 cardboard boxes. It wasn’t so easy to explain that I needed their trash to frame my photos. In the factory’s workshop, I found the old chains for hanging my “framed” pictures. Then I bought a kids’ set of hand painting. A few hours before the opening party I was sitting on the grass at the Alliance France garden with all this stuff and painting boxes with my both hands. When photos were stuck to the painted boxes and boxes were attached to the chains, the workers hung these constructions to the walls. Yes, it was something refreshing for everybody. I just forgot to put prices on the pictures… “At least it was fun,” the organizers said. There were a lot of people at the opening party, three hundred it’s a lot for Pretoria.

Not sure what amazed the visitors more – either the subject of my photos which was rusty trash or fruit boxes, painted by my hands and hanging on iron chains. Probably both.

Here is an article from the Kormorant newspaper from the opening party. Not long after this event, my Nikon was stolen with exciting footage of an old port around Cape Town. I never bought another one. Too bulky to carry…