Classic @omarzrobles also shot on the Exakta, 35mm B&W

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Portrait of Owami, Niku, and Rusk South Africa, 2025

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Parents of Othalive South Africa, 2025

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Along the Knysna coast of South Africa, harvesting oysters has been part of local community life for generations. Yet what has always been a traditional food source is now labelled “illegal poaching,” creating a tension between conservation laws and ancestral ways of living with the sea. A few of the so-called “poachers” allowed me to photograph their faces, without names or exact locations. Oysters Collectors South Africa, 2025

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Relationships are never simple. They are the place where our wounds, our longings, but also our hidden strengths rise to the surface. For Selin (30) and Neko (29), it has been a long and rocky road. Growing up in a rough environment, they entered adulthood with almost no tools for navigating the terrain of love. Two years ago they became parents to little Othalive, whose name in Xhosa carries the meaning “one who hears the name of God.” And it is for his sake that they try their very best. They work on their relationship out of a shared desire to give their child a family, something many children around them do not have, a goal they both recognize as meaningful and important. In them, I see what I believe about humanity and love: that people can rise above the patterns they inherited and that tenderness can appear even in places where no one taught them how to feel or speak it. Despite the setbacks, despite the odds stacked against them, they continue to work through their recurring disagreements - learning, stumbling, trying again. They move forward while standing on the fragile ground of unhealed pain, their inherited past, and the fractured examples they grew up with. In their little family, their own small universe, love is not the absence of wounds; it is the courage to keep meeting each other vulnerably in spite of them and to hold each other’s hand while finding their way into better versions of themselves. Parents of Othalive South Africa, 2025

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For me, the artistic path has never been about expression - it is a form of devotion, a way of remembering the original silence from which everything arises. Creation is my daily practice of attunement, an alignment between the visible and the unseen. It calls for stillness, honesty, and surrender, allowing me to become an instrument of service rather than a maker of things. I return again and again to the space where the self dissolves and the portraits are born. In that moment, art becomes my offering, both my tantric and mystic path: I am nothing, and I am everything Art as Sādhanā 2025

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Children who grow up in poverty often carry a kind of maturity etched into their still-young faces, an intergenerational inheritance beyond their years. The traces of sadness and witnessed trauma are written there, visible and unmistakable. And yet, beneath that guarded expression, the child still remains - appearing in fleeting gestures, in subtle displays of wonder they cannot help but reveal. Portrait of Wil 15 years old Portrait of Nikki 18 years old South Africa, 2025

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“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.” Nelson Mandela Portrait Justing with his Son South Africa, 2025

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Portrait of Joseph South Africa, 2025

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Portrait of Alice South Africa, 2025

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I spent time with Blue today. It was a goodbye - I saw it in his eyes. I felt a deep sadness, but also immense gratitude for having met his gentle being, and for being allowed to photograph him over the years. I learned today that horses don’t cry, but sometimes they find a way to weep through us Portrait of Blue South Africa, 2025

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I have always felt called to explore the depths of human existence and to find beauty even in life’s most difficult moments. We live in a world driven by a societal addiction to optimism, endlessly urged to remain “positive”, and in the process, we become indifferent and blind to the full spectrum of lived experience. I choose to meet life as it is - raw, layered, and unadorned. Nothing is ever simply black or white, as our realities unfold in the vast space between, filled with subtle hues and endless nuances. To honor each person’s story, their truth, without forcing it into a narrow frame of “feel good” is to hold space for genuine witnessing and connection. portraits of domestic workers South Africa

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It is difficult to photograph people whose lives are marked by hardship, but I also know that it has always been this way for most, and we must not assume that we know how to fix it. Yet I believe it’s absolutely non-negotiable that everyone who crosses our path deserves to be met with the fullest measure of our care and capacity for kindness. That, I think, makes a real difference. It may not fix the world, but it changes something essential: the way we relate to one another, the way we coexist. Portrait of Justin with His Son South Africa, 2025

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Some of you met Simba in April

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Our skin is the first boundary, a subtle veil separating our inner world from everything that exists outside of us. It holds us apart, yet it is also what makes contact possible. It is paradoxical, at once an armor and an invitation to closeness. When we touch or allow ourselves to be touched, we cross into another’s domain, not just their body, but the territory of their trust. We are not merely permitting contact with the body, but with the entire landscape of our being. Every gesture, every caress, becomes a conversation between two worlds, momentarily harmonized. The skin remembers every gesture. It translates warmth, tenderness, and longing into the language of feeling. It is a sacred conduit, an offering to the elemental harmony that binds all living things: self and other, seen and felt, human and divine. Violet and Claire 2025

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