Official Photographer

MATTHEW WILLMAN: FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER

‘In 2001, I began a journey as a young photographer to discover who we were as a nation, the hopes, the fears, our accomplishments and most importantly the reality of who we are today on the other side of Apartheid. I discovered a nation torn by racial divides and a history still working itself out of our society. It took me nine years to achieve the single most inspiring shoot I have done to date, and that was to find myself sitting by a window on a cool August morning in Johannesburg with a man who helped define a nation.'

Matthew Willman is a freelance documentary photographer working across Southern Africa with some of the world’s foremost charitable and funding organisations that include Oxfam International, World Health Organisation and the European Commission.

Matthew’s passion for photography combined with his personal interest in issues that exist within communities in Southern Africa has afforded him very privileged experiences and commissions with people and places that go beyond the external and calls for an intimacy that many don’t allow themselves to step into.

As a photographer his experiences have afforded Willman diverse and interesting photographic commissions that include places like Robben Island, Inanda Heritage, The Royal Ballet School in London, Tromso in the Arctic Circle and Red Fern Aboriginal Centre in Australia.

Personalities he has photographed, include from amongst others:

Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Annie Lennox, FW De Klerk, The Dalai Lama and US President Bill Clinton.

Matthew is both intrigued and inspired by people, who they are and what they shape themselves to be. None more so than the man Nelson Mandela.

Over the past 7 years Matthew has worked as a commissioned photographer to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, being afforded many incredibly intimate experiences with a man who for Matthew embodies the very spirit and conviction he as a young boy was yearning to find.

Matthew Willman is the founder of the Matthew Willman Foundation for the Visual Arts that aims to further the development of individuals and communities through programs and projects that inspire change and progression through the impact and promotion of the visual arts. His work in this unique exhibition is somewhere between that early awakening and its captured moments…