archival ink print on Hahnemühle Baryta

Artwork date: 2018
Signature details: accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist
Edition: number 1 from an edition of 10

(1)

image size: 42 x 59.5 cm; framed size: 73.5 x 53.5 x 4 cm

Notes:

Daylin Paul is an independent photographer, writer and educator based in Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa. He is a graduate from Rhodes University, School of Journalism. After starting his career as a press photographer in Cape Town, he decided to work as an independent photographer and travelled to East Asia where he was a stringer for Penta Press photo agency in Seoul, South Korea, and a gallery assistant at Documentary Arts Asia in Chiang Mai, Thailand. After five years in Asia, Paul returned to South Africa and worked for various leading news organisations, both local and international. His work during the FeesMustFall protests in 2015 and 2016 drew critical acclaim and global recognition, and was published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy. Subsequently, he was a regional finalist in the Vodacom Journalist of the Year awards (2017). It was during this time that he began moving away from photojournalism and into documentary photography. Paul was awarded the prestigious Ernest Cole Award in 2017 for his work on coal mining and burning in the Mpumalanga Highveld. This project was published as his debut monograph, Broken Land, and exhibited widely. He teaches in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography program at the Market Photo Workshop, and is a writer and contributor to a number of local and international NGOs and development agencies. Lots 58 and 59 are from Daylin Paul’s series, Broken Land. The series examines the coal-fuelled climate change and human rights crisis in the province of Mpumalanga,South Africa. As Paul comments, "These power stations, while providing electricity for an energy desperate South Africa, also have a devastating and lasting impact on the environment and the health of local people. […] Vast tracts of fertile, arable land are being ripped up, the landscape scarred with the black pits of coal mines while coal burning power stations, are one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the Paul looks at both the micro and macro issues of coal with a documentarian’s eye: recording evidence and conducting interviews as a journalist would, but also interpreting landscapes and scenes as an artist. The photographs in this series look for traces of the subtle, paradoxical tragedy that haunts both the land and the people of Mpumalanga – blessed with unfathomable mineral wealth, but cursed by the industries that extract and burn it. This work was published in the monograph, Broken Land, and shown as part of solo exhibitions at KZNSA Gallery, Durban; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; andFORMS Gallery, Cape Town.