Grandma Ntombi (her name meaning maiden in Xhosa) was the first child in her family born with this rare skin condition. Here she is photographed with her two granddaughters, Lulutho, whose name in Xhosa translates to grace or knowledge, and Buhle, which means beautiful.
Along the Knysna coast of South Africa, harvesting oysters has been part of local community life for generations. Yet what has always been a traditional food source is now labelled “illegal poaching,” creating a tension between conservation laws and ancestral ways of living with the sea.
A few of the so-called “poachers” allowed me to photograph their faces, without names or exact locations.
Oysters Collectors
South Africa, 2025
Relationships are never simple. They are the place where our wounds, our longings, but also our hidden strengths rise to the surface. For Selin (30) and Neko (29), it has been a long and rocky road. Growing up in a rough environment, they entered adulthood with almost no tools for navigating the terrain of love.
Two years ago they became parents to little Othalive, whose name in Xhosa carries the meaning “one who hears the name of God.” And it is for his sake that they try their very best. They work on their relationship out of a shared desire to give their child a family, something many children around them do not have, a goal they both recognize as meaningful and important.
In them, I see what I believe about humanity and love: that people can rise above the patterns they inherited and that tenderness can appear even in places where no one taught them how to feel or speak it.
Despite the setbacks, despite the odds stacked against them, they continue to work through their recurring disagreements - learning, stumbling, trying again. They move forward while standing on the fragile ground of unhealed pain, their inherited past, and the fractured examples they grew up with.
In their little family, their own small universe, love is not the absence of wounds; it is the courage to keep meeting each other vulnerably in spite of them and to hold each other’s hand while finding their way into better versions of themselves.
Parents of Othalive
South Africa, 2025
For me, the artistic path has never been about expression - it is a form of devotion, a way of remembering the original silence from which everything arises. Creation is my daily practice of attunement, an alignment between the visible and the unseen. It calls for stillness, honesty, and surrender, allowing me to become an instrument of service rather than a maker of things.
I return again and again to the space where the self dissolves and the portraits are born. In that moment, art becomes my offering, both my tantric and mystic path:
I am nothing, and I am everything
Art as Sādhanā
2025
Children who grow up in poverty often carry a kind of maturity etched into their still-young faces, an intergenerational inheritance beyond their years. The traces of sadness and witnessed trauma are written there, visible and unmistakable. And yet, beneath that guarded expression, the child still remains - appearing in fleeting gestures, in subtle displays of wonder they cannot help but reveal.
Portrait of Wil
15 years old
Portrait of Nikki
18 years old
South Africa, 2025
“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”
Nelson Mandela
Portrait Justing with his Son
South Africa, 2025
these sand hills, these mountains of time
have watched the ocean for centuries
and in their devotion
they too have learned
to rise and fold like waves
South Africa, 2025
