[The Guardian] The big picture: a moment of tenderness on the Western Cape

The big picture: a moment of tenderness on the Western Cape

Behind Anne Rearick’s bittersweet shot of two young friends in the South African countryside lies a tale of hope and tragedy

The American photographer Anne Rearick took this picture in 2015 in the Western Cape of South Africa. By then she had been going back and forward to the country for a decade, often photographing in Langa, the oldest of Cape Town’s sprawling townships, alarmingly little changed since apartheid. She had first been invited to go to Langa by a woman she got to know, Sindi Mpontshane. The boy on the left of this photograph is Sindi’s son, Khuste.

The picture is part of Rearick’s “Township” series, currently on show at L’Oeil Urbain photography festival in France. “When I met Sindi,” Rearick says, “she was living in Langa in a hostel with about 10 other people, no indoor toilets and running water only in one central location. It was very bleak. In Langa, there’s murder every other day, and nobody cares about it. But Sindi was incredibly welcoming, a survivor, an amazing woman. She was among the first in the townships to have successfully prosecuted her husband for abuse she had suffered.”

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