I discovered the Film and Photographic Society on campus while enrolled as a student at The University of Cape Town in the social sciences faculty. I graduated with a B.Soc.Sc (in Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Social Work). Using a camera, the injustice of the oppressive Apartheid system, and early visits to  the townships led to my decision to become photographer. I began assisting professional fashion and commercial photographers in Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa. Learning darkroom skills at the Space Theatre, I shifted to working as a press photographer in Johannesburg during the height of the Apartheid era.  As the State of Emergency was declared in 1985 I left my position at the Star newspaper in order to attend the LCC's first year of their photojournalism course. 

While on the course I was 'picked up' by the Photo Editor of the Sunday Times who said to me 'what are you doing here?' I had won two awards - one was a World Press Award plus I had spent time printing up my portfolio in the press darkroom. At the Sunday Times I was commissioned to shoot many portraits of celebrities. Because of my assisting experience I knew how to set up for the studio, how to light, how to process and print;  portrait and documentary photography became equal in   focus. 

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My  images have appeared internationally in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The FT Weekend Magazine, Vanity Fair, Interview, Vogue, Port, The Guardian Weekend, The Sunday Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Forbes, GQ and Esquire.

My photographs have been exhibited internationally - namely the National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers' Gallery, Imperial War Museum, The Royal Academy, OXO Gallery in London, Sothebys, Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in France, Bensusan Museum, Robben Island Museum in South Africa,  Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden,  Dali International Photography Festival, Yunnan Province, China. 

 

In 2025 I had solo exhibitions at the IPFO Festival in Olten, Switzerland, and at Photo Oxford, Oxford, UK.

 

I judged the World Press Awards in 2014, and the John Kobal Portrait Award in 1999 and the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Award  in 2010.
 

In December 2018 The Royal Photographic Society announced that I had been voted onto the ‘Hundred Heroines’ list of women from across the world who are transforming photography today. 

I feel privileged to have received several awards including the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, the Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year Award, the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan in 1997, the European Final Art Polaroid Award in 1999, the John Kobal Book Award in 2003. I have been included in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Award twice, the AI-AP Archive in 2008 and 2015. A winner in Latin American Fotografia 4 in 2015, included in the World Press Awards twice, a finalist in the 2017 LensCulture Portrait Awards.

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The National Portrait Gallery has acquired over one hundred of my portraits for it's collection.

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Between 1996 and 2002 I returned to South Africa frequently to document the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Truth and Lies. I shot on large format. Truth and Lies was published by Granta, the New Press and Mail and Guardian in 2002. In the same year it was awarded the Kobal Book Award.

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More recently, I had the honour of receiving the Amateur Photographer Lifetime Achievement Award at a ceremony in February 2026.
 

Here and There; An Expedition of Sorts, was published by GOST Books in 2024. It is a personal family - the discovery of a lost branch of my family. The book contains some of my early work, and the Sangoma project 2002 - 2008  about the traditional healers based in Badimong, on the South Africa - Lesotho border; the Sangoma are called by their Ancestors to heal. The book covers themes of home, displacement, belonging including the refugee crisis; Linosa, Lampedusa, Calais, Lesvos, Latvia and Lithuania, in Eastern Europe, the West Bank, Ukraine. 

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My feature documentary film called The Water Rats  about a diverse group who came together to swim during Lockdown, has won three Impact Awards and has screened internationally.

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I am currently working on several photographic projects including a feature film documentary about the screenwriter Norman Wexler, who wrote the iconic films of the seventies, including Saturday Night Fever.

My clients have included Oxfam, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, FXB International, Unicef, Save the Children Fund, Tesco, Nespresso, Sony, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC, Comic Relief and Fish Love.