Yasser Booley (1975*) has been photographing his surroundings since 1992, when he received his first camera from his father as a gift. His approach and style developed and evolved on the streets of Cape Town, an ofttimes violent city, made all the more violent in contrast to the incredible natural beauty, and beauty of the people who live there. He cut his teeth working as a stringer for local national newspapers and as producer, fixer on documentaries and short films.
The first time he studied photography came 3 years after he started working for one of the major national newspapers in South Africa, where he studied documentary photography in Berlin.
He has exhibited his work in Spain, Britain, Iceland, South Africa, America, Australia, Belgium and Holland, the last two as a result of his monograph ‘South Africa at Liberty’ being launched in Brussels in 2016. Most of his exhibitions have taken place outside the conventional “art world” in order to make his photography accessible to the ‘man on the street’ as he believes the power of art across the barriers of language, race and culture is its ability to inspire, remind and inform and that this cannot be limited only to people who visit galleries.
He is very interested in putting photography in unconventional public spaces and seeing how people engage with the work.
The visual language whether we realise it or not has become ubiquitous in modern society and plays a very important role in shaping the way we see the world and more importantly ourselves and this is the space he prefers to ‘play’ in, using photography as a pedagogic method to open the possibility of being able to choose how we ‘see’.
INSTAGRAM
