Don Edkins – EDN Interview
We have had several posts including Don Edkins, described in one of them as ”…a true gentleman in the world documentary community, and a man who in his work in a true Griersonian way seeks to combine the documentary art form, campaign and information…”
Edkins is member of the month of EDN, that presents a fine informative interview with him. Here is a taster (on his background) and a link to where you can find the whole talk:
I became interested in photography during my high school years and used it to document whatever situation I was facing in my life. Having to leave South Africa because of refusing to fight in the Angolan war in 1975, I ended up photographing life in Guatemala during the military dictatorship, an LSD conference in Santa Cruz, California, the effect migrant labour had on families in Lesotho, and refugees from the Rwandan genocide. I was a member of Afrapix, a collective of South African photographers documenting life under apartheid, and then moved to Germany in 1988 where I joined a media collective, the Medienwerkstatt Freiburg. That is where I started working in documentary film, and the first two films I made – Goldwidows and The Colour of Gold – were about migrant labour in South Africa and Lesotho. Affordable video projectors became available in the early ‘90s, and so we took these films to show in rural communities in Lesotho: the experience of the incredible discussions that took place after the screenings has influenced much of my work since then. The mobile cinema we started in Lesotho has now been runningcontinuously for more than twenty years.
