My apologies for the poor quality of this shot. It’s a scan of a jumbo print I made back in 2004, but this drives the point home even better.

This was the last picture I took before being deported from Zanzibar. The picture itself is, well, pretty, and doesn’t suggest anything of the wild events that led up to its taking. It is nonetheless apart of the whole event and looking back at it now it has attained a symbolic representation of exactly what I was going though at the time, and what was to come.

This was a moment when – for the first time that day – I was able to relax, and I processed this feeling by photographing the calmest thing that I saw while being held in the custody of port immigration. I doubt this image will ever have the privilege of undergoing hours of post production, then projected onto a large sheet of paper before it is placed in an acid free frame and hung before all to admire. It will however always sit in my archive, and every time I stumble upon it I will remember the feint shake I had in my body from not eating, the relief that I was not in an African prison cell, and the anger that a policeman had just stolen all of my luggage and money, except for what I had strapped to the inside of my thigh. That US$250 dollars was still there, the bandage was cutting off the blood supply to my leg making it unbelievably uncomfortable but there was no ways I was going to remove it until I was off the island.

This sunset also represents the end of a way of traveling for me. It took a traumatic event like this to shape how I did things in the future – I crossed the rest of the continent with a change of clothes in a plastic packet and only just enough money to get me to the Israeli border where I started working to afford a plane ticket home. The people and places I came in contact with and the understanding I gained from them shaped who I am and what I do. And a large part of this is due to the consequences that followed me trying to get away from a police officer that wanted a bribe.

When I eventually made it back to South Africa I chose what I felt were the 14 best pictures from the trip, stuck them up in a coffee lounge and called it my first photo exhibition.

I’ve been revisiting all my old journals and archives recently to understand the relationship between photographing and the photographer, the subject and the taker, and analyzing how the photographer, his/her work, and the documented subject matter co-exist. This is brainchild of an up coming exhibition titled Process to be launched at Spin Space in Cape Town on 31 May. Art theorist and curator Chantal Louw is collaborating with me to create this exhibition that confronts such questions (and hopefully generates some conclusions) in a time when there is much controversy surrounding the photographer.

I strongly suggest you bookmark 6pm on Monday 31 May and follow http://dspgallery.com/news-at-dsp for more updates. This is not to be missed