Puku Story Festival - Part Two: Story-Telling

In February, 2015 I was privileged enough to be asked to photograph Grahamstown's Puku Story Festival - a festival aimed at promoting the telling, writing, publishing and reading of stories in isiXhosa. This is part two of my experience of the festival.

Stories. They fill our minds with wonder and open new worlds for our imaginations to explore. They show us our own world in a way that we had never quite seen it. Whether they're meant for the young or the old, stories allow us to both escape from the world and to find our place in it.

The Puku Story Festival celebrates stories of all forms - sung, spoken, written and acted. It embraces stories that have been written, and encourages the writing of them. It encourages those with a voice to use it in whatever way they can to tell their own stories, and more than anything, it encourages them to tell those stories in their own tongue, and in their own way.

Those who follow this blog may know that I have a tendency to tell stories through photography and explain them through words. I don't want to explain too much today. I think I'll just let the photographs tell their own story of the wonderful Puku Story Festival that I was privileged to be a part of.

Puku Story Festival - Part One: Hitting the Road

In February, 2015 I was privileged enough to be asked to photograph Grahamstown's Puku Story Festival - a festival aimed at promoting the telling, writing, publishing and reading of stories in isiXhosa. This is part one of my experience of the festival.

I can’t understand a word that they’re saying.

There are over forty children, all under six years old, crammed into a classroom with no fewer than six adults, myself being one of them, all talking at once, and there is not a single word that I recognise. My primary school lessons have failed me, my “Khunjani khakuhle” nothing more than a mixed up memory that makes no sense in the real world. At least not when strung together in the sing-song way that stuck in my head. And not only is this just day one, it is just school one of day one. What have I gotten myself into?

The answer? Three days filled with endless smiles and laughter. Three days of excited shouting and running and twirling around to “Lizzy Lizzy”. Three days of making music with hands and mouths, emptied tins of jam and sosatie sticks or washing pegs. Three days of barely understanding a word that is spoken, but seeing with my own eyes wide faces filled with wonder at stories that I can’t understand, and don’t need to.

The Puku Story Festival was on its way to Grahamstown, and I spent three days travelling from school to school for road shows in areas that I didn’t even know existed, and got to see the excitement first hand as the children were told stories in their mother tongue. I got to capture their spell-bound glances, their shoulders hunched in anticipation and their unrelenting joy at having story-tellers come to visit.

I couldn’t understand a word that they were saying. I didn’t have to.

Playful

Verne and Monique
Cape Town

Monique and Verne are a playful couple. Mostly I've known them to love playing computer and board games, but it was the playfulness between them that stuck in my mind when I was trying to think of somewhere in Cape Town to do a couple shoot with them. I grew up in Cape Town, right up the road from where the two of them were staying, and all that kept running through my head was the idea of playgrounds. So we found one!

At first there was a bit of hesitation, both Verne and Monique not being used to being in front of the camera. But before long, all the awkwardness was forgotten and it became an afternoon of fun and laughter. From tyre swings to tiny slides, roundabouts to seesaw horses, there was a lot of talk about childhoods spent in parks and memories coming up left, right and centre. To top it all off, we found a perfect tree for climbing, and Monii graciously volunteered!

Thank you to Verne and Monique for a wonderfully fun afternoon reminiscing about childhoods, laughing and climbing trees. You guys were absolutely fantastic! This is actually the second shoot that I did with this awesome couple. Watch this space for the photographs from their wedding, coming next week.