Jong Afrikaner: A Self Portrait

Description

Jong Afrikaner: A Self-Portrait is a series of frank and elegant portraits of urbanised, creative, engaged Afrikaners who present a challenge to preconceived ideas about Afrikaner identity and values. These ‘new’ Afrikaners negotiate their lives as a minority group in South Africa. Their connection to each other—by kin, marriage, friendship or shared beliefs, preferences and tastes—suggests a cohesion very different from the forced identity of the apartheid years.

Van Wyk chose his subjects—all of them known to him personally through friendship, work or family—for their extraordinary and interesting lives that demonstrate a multi-layered and richly varied Afrikaner identity: a married gay couple adopts a black child; a pint-sized young woman is the voice of an Afrikaans ‘rap-rave’ band making waves globally; an Afrikaner man becomes a sangoma.