Heartlands

 A book project spanning 25 years that explores the often harrowing experience of land ownership and land restitution in South Africa. This page features a small preview from the book, which is currently in production. At a portfolio review at BursaFotoFest  in Turkey in 2012, I showed the director of photography for National Geographic Magazine Sarah Leen a small selection of photographs from the project. She said, "But where is the light? You have such beautiful light in your country". Beautiful light, yes, and oceans of suffering. It was a difficult paradox to bring out.

The book features an accompanying essay by award-winning writer Sean Christie.

 'With Heartlands, photographer Caroline Suzman presents a timely essay on farmland life in South Africa in the 21st century, taking an uncompromising line through the difficult terrains of land reform, rural violence and its effects, labour relations in the agricultural sector, and other ties that bind people and places together in rural South Africa. Heartland, is a work of unflinching realism that nevertheless occupies the intersection of photojournalism, documentary and portraiture, reproducing Suzman’s view that truth in regard of complex rural social issues lives in the large grey area between the poles of discourse and debate, and that no single recipe exists for capturing it.'

Sean Christie, author of Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard, Life Among the Stowaways