Richard Stupart

There are twenty four minutes left on this laptop battery. Power to the plugs in ‘hotel’ Tropikana (don’t ask) has failed, though the lights work absolutely fine. Outside is a little dark, and slightly infused with the smell of burnt trash and roasting meat. Somewhere out there, a bar cranks out huge sound while patrons lounge in plastic furniture drinking beer. The waitresses at the bar no longer trust me to return their beer bottles and have begun keeping a deposit. This has not been entirely unreasonable on their part.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once a year, like an artistic atom bomb, the National Arts Festival – or Fest to its friends -comes to Grahamstown. Artists of all stripes and skills descend upon what is otherwise a small and difficult to reach settlement in the already-pretty-remote Eastern Cape. Last year was my first experience of Fest in person, working as a photographer on a newspaper that gets produced for the length of the event. Which, last year, meant fifteen days. It was a tough, but rewarding experience. One which unfortunately left  me delirious with some evil flu at the end, the likes of which I have only ever had on one other occasion. This year was wholly different.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last year I missed the One in Nine march. Rhodes University does it every year, as a protest against the truly medievil levels of rape and violence directed at South African women. The name derives from the estimate that up to one in every nine rapes in the country goes unreported. The activist fringe even claims that a woman in South Africa is more likely to be raped than she is likely to learn to read. This year, I was around. So I signed up and went along to take photographs and try to be useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

South Africans I have traveled with – and people visiting South Africa from abroad that I have met – often remark on the sheer number of contrasts in the country. On the fact that it really feels like many countries in one. Some of the time, these comments are adressed to our unequal (shamefully the most in the world now), still highly raced, human landscape.  But in happier times, I’ve heard folk say this of the country’s physcial landscape too.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s December 10 and Tom, Saskia and I have come to the half-completed Karin Children’s Clinic to watch a local women’s group hold a weekly meeting to discuss administrative matters. They manage projects from beadmaking to raising livestock on a pay-it-forward scheme amongst various families in the group. A man from the Heifer Foundation – who will confess on the drive home that their project in Gulu has largely been a disaster (more on this in another post) – is busy reporting on the status of the cow breeding program. Nobody seems particularly impressed. I feel hot, having decided to stand outside to take pictures of the proceedings. We have arrived in time for what appears to be the last item on the day’s agenda. The opening of a large cardboard box with a Samaritan’s Purse logo on the side. I sigh.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s taken a little longer for me to get my 2011 improvements programmed in, but I’ve been diligently working on it, when not preoccupied with health scares, photo editing or more recently, discovering how dense media studies reading can be when you have, erm.. no background in it at all. But one challenge at a time. As of today, Where The Road Goes has a store. Yes, ladies and gentlemen – a store.

Read the rest of this entry »

In five hours it will be time to get up for introductory lectures, but every late night hour working on editing pictures has been worth it. Most of the pictures have stories, and many of those stories will be told in coming posts – just as soon as Telkom (that’s the company that controls phone lines in South Africa for overseas readers) deigns to visit internet connectivity upon my house. For now though, days of adjusting exposure, black point and god-alone-remembers-what-else means that there is a lot to start looking at. Here is an overview.
Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty three days until departure to Gulu. If you had followed this blog a year ago in the run up to Cairo, you would understand that I have a fascination with countdowns. Particularly at the end of the year, and particularly for adventures. This involves both. The previous week or so has not been spent idly – with emails of varying length traversing the continent to get arrangements confirmed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today was my last proper day of class and the lucky beans are back on the sidewalks. There is one more assignment to be handed in – a whale-esque 5,000 word nonfiction piece – but barring some intervention from the gods of unanticipated disasters, I can get to call myself a journalist in a couple of months and a graduation ceremony. If there are two things that the course has taught me in the last year it’s that I deeply, absolutely do not want to be a reporter, and that I really do love finding and telling stories about things. With the journey to Gulu around 32 days away, I have been gearing up to get the most out of the visit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is day ten of fourteen production days at the National Arts Festival here in Grahamstown. Having drunk enough instant coffee to give my stomach a callous, I brought a bodum into the newsroom with me this morning. Mmmmm. Real coffee.  The days are spent busily climbing through every market stall, theatre, coffee shop and street for photographs. The evenings are spent catching up on the parts of my life which are not strictly arts or Arts festival related. Which is a polite way of saying “Dear god, I have been busy these last days”. Out of the chaos, however, are a few more images. And a promise of a story as soon as I have properly slept.

Read the rest of this entry »

Played by Bevan Cullinan, Gary the Tooth Fairy is a comedy play on at Festival in which Gary discusses life as a tooth fairy in modern South Africa. What was meant to be a simple photo shoot for an interview turned into an hour of running up and down the garden outside the Journalism building. Fairies are fickle creatures to tie down for an interview, you see.

Read the rest of this entry »