Alumni Spotlight with Fredrik Sjöstrand
Current Occupation: Journalist
Workshops: Project South Africa 2016
Instructors: John Christopher Anderson
These images were taken on the Momenta’s Project South Africa Workshop 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo copyright Fredrik Sjöstrand/Momenta Workshops 2016.
1. What motivated you to take a workshop and why did you pick Momenta?
What’s not to like about jumping in at the deep end? I have attended different photo workshops in the past and have generally loved the experience. You strike out on this new photographic endeavor, camera in hand, and come back to find that – well, today maybe you struck out more in the baseball sense of the word. That photography is 99,9 percent about failure is endlessly fascinating to me, and also, strangely alluring. It may sound pretentious, but when I go out into the world I want to learn stuff. And putting a camera to your eye, it’s almost hard not to.
I chose Momenta’s Nonprofit Photography Workshop because you get to team up with a local nonprofit organization, and try and put together a bunch of photos that hopefully will be of some use to the organization in the future. You go to work in a real world situation and you are expected to give it your best.
The fact that the workshop had this purpose was what appealed to me the most. That, and – of course – sitting down with the instructor and a few beers for the nightly one-on-one editing sessions.
These images were taken on Momenta’s Project South Africa Workshop 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo copyright Fredrik Sjöstrand/Momenta Workshops 2016.
2. What surprised you most about the location you visited or the experience of working with a nonprofit?
Well, people that have their hearts in what they do tend to be lovely to be around, and this was certainly the case with everyone I met during my two weeks with the folks at Abalimi Bezekhaya in Cape Town. So, no surprise there really.
Abalimi Bezekhaya means ”farmers of the home” in Xhosa, and it’s a non-profit organization that supports micro-farmers in the Cape Flats townships to grow vegetables organically and create livelihoods.
The only practical thing I hadn’t really thought about was local transportation. In my case, the organization I had chosen needed me to have my own wheels so I could pop between the different locations without having to rely on their staff to get me around. I went to different townships during my stay and considering they can be quite large (Khayelitsha, where I spent most of my time, has a population of around 400 000) I was happy to have my little rental. I dubbed it ”The Hairraiser”.
Being from Sweden, the steering wheel was obviously on the wrong side from what I was used to, and at one point – going into a busy roundabout – I got a bit stressed out and managed to inadvertently open the door in mid-flight, so to speak, when I frantically was trying to shift gears with the wrong hand (that is, the right one).
Most of the time, however, I think I chose the correct lanes…
3. What was the best lesson you took away from your workshop?
I learnt many things from Chris, whom I found to be a Zen archer of no-nonsense feedback and great fun to be around. He would plow through hundreds and hundreds of images every evening (most of the time, he’d insist on looking at everything we shoot during the day), searching for the right ”selects”.
But maybe I can boil down the best lesson to this: I am responsible for everything I put into the frame. A red sign on the wall in the back, that steals attention from what I think the image is really about? Yup, responsible for that too.
These images were taken on Momenta’s Project South Africa Workshop 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo copyright Fredrik Sjöstrand/Momenta Workshops 2016.
4. What was your favorite photograph from the workshop and why?
I tend to like slightly quirky photographs with a lot going on. You know, frozen moments where some aspect of our common humanity are laid bare in a way that make us smile just a little bit. (My God! That really sounded pretentious, didn’t it?)
However, my favorite image from this workshop has none of those things. It’s a quiet moment at dawn, in one of Abalimi Bezekhaya’s gardens in the townships, and I am with the organization’s trailblazer: Mama Christina Kaba.
For decades she has fought to combat hunger in her community. A formidable grassroots leader and not one likely to ever back down, which – I hope – may come across in this shot.
5. What would you tell a potential student to help them prepare for their experience with Momenta?
It’s such a terrible cliché, but you get out what you put in. I can honestly say that I’ve probably never worked harder, or been more invested in what I was doing in every moment, than I was during these two workshop weeks in Cape Town.
Editing would always go into the night and quite often I’d rise before the sun, get into ”The Hairraiser” and drive to a new spot in the townships.
When I look back, maybe I’m actually more proud of the energy and the hours I put in, than the photographs that came out. That in itself is not a bad feeling and, I think, a great lesson. You do the work – you learn. So don’t be a lazy bastard.
Fredrik Sjöstrand works as a reporter and photographer at the newspaper Ystads Allehanda in southern Sweden, but occasionally takes time off to do other stories and assignments.
His work has been featured in such diverse publications and media outlets as the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Expressen, the Nobel Prize Museum, Australian Teacher Magazine, the Canadian newspaper La Tribune, Radio Canada, Meetings International Magazine, Opus (Swedish classical music magazine) and the small community weekly newspaper Bay Harbour News, in Canterbury, New Zealand.
Some of his images from the Momenta workshop in Cape Town were published in Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, and in MyKitchen Magazine, one of South Africa’s top food magazines.
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Join Momenta for more Project workshops next year and use your photography as a force of change.
Alumni Spotlight: Fran Meckler