arts and design

Tracing lives: a visual response to coronavirus

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The ability to move us beyond cliche is a characteristic photographers shortlisted for the Prix Pictet share, and it is important as we grapple with the reality of the world as we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis.

The global lockdown has birthed new cliches: wildlife cautiously exploring the unpeopled streets, or iconic monuments devoid of tourists, ignored save for the occasional solitary individual escaping their own confinement.

This commission asked photographers to move beyond the obvious, and present a series of images that respond to the issues confronting us today, and begin to plot a route through to a new future and new ways of thinking about the world.


Alexia Webster

Contact tracing

A few months ago Covid-19 spread across the world like a force of change and I found myself, like millions around the globe, suddenly and unexpectedly grounded. I live in New York City, but I was working on a project in the rainforest in Madagascar when the government announced it was shutting its borders. I managed to get on the last flight out of the country to South Africa and I arrived in my childhood home, Johannesburg, a few days before a military-enforced lockdown grounded all international flights indefinitely.

I had left Johannesburg over 10 years ago and I have spent these years looking outward, restlessly exploring this strange, complex world. But suddenly I was forced to sit still. The city seemed to have been turned off; the sky cleared, the traffic stopped and we all went inside. I felt shipwrecked and trapped. As the military started rolling into the city in armoured vehicles, forcing people inside, and we believed the virus was stalking the streets, I felt a familiar unsettledness, similar to the anxious uncertainty of my early childhood growing up during apartheid.

Apartheid loomed large over my childhood. Our phones were tapped by the security police, friends of my parents were killed by the government and many nights I would lie awake eavesdropping on anxious political discussions. My parents are both academics, teachers and political activists who have dedicated most of their lives trying to help build a more just and equal society. Now as the world entered a new uncertain time, I found myself stranded right where I had started, just a few minutes away from my first guides to surviving a world in turmoil, my parents.

So I took my camera and spent the afternoons of the lockdown sitting with a mask on in their garden interviewing them about their lives before I was born, sifting through giant, chaotic, dusty piles of family photos, and skulking around their house with a portable projector and a bottle of disinfectant.

This is an incomplete portrait of my parents. This story leaves out many of the most notable successes, heartbreaks and struggles that defined their lives. But it’s a small glimpse into the quiet violences and small triumphs of life, and the steps that led my parents to the moment that made me.

(Left) The Callinicos. Taken in 1939 in a portrait studio in Johannesburg my mother, Luli Callinicos, is seen as a toddler posing with her parents, Thalia and Yanni Callinicos, and my grandfather’s two brothers. They had arrived in South Africa a few years before from a tiny village on a small Greek island. (Right) The Websters. My father on the right with his older brother, Trevor and my grandparents Enid and Lionel Webster



(Left) Photographers Portrait Studio, Johannesburg, 1939. My mother, Luli Callinicos, at two years old sits with her parents, Thalia and Yannis Callinicos, who ran a small grocery store in the mining city of Boksburg, and her two uncles. The family had arrived in South Africa a few years before from a tiny village on a small Greek island.

(Right) The family home, Fort Hare, 1947. My father, Eddie Webster, on the right with his parents, Enid and Lionel Webster, both schoolteachers, and his older brother, Trevor. My grandfather had recently returned home from the second world war after being away for four years.

My father at two-and-a-half years old, a few months after being in hospital



“I think that was possibly the most traumatic moment in my life although I have no recognisable conscious memory of it. What I know is what my mother told me … In the 1940s Cape Town experienced an epidemic of diphtheria, and diphtheria, like Covid-19, is highly infectious and it was believed at the time by the medical profession that it weakened the heart and that if someone moved quickly or jerked that could lead to the collapse of the heart and you’d die. I was two years old when I acquired the virus. The diagnosis once it was made was that I had to be locked down, I had to be tied down and put in a glass case to prevent the infection from spreading to others. My mother was only allowed to visit once or twice a week. I was there, tied down in a hospital bed, for six weeks.”

Alexia W 1

“My generation was born in South Africa but our parents were immigrants. It was the height of colonialism and the Greek community, a vulnerable, newly arrived minority, was at that time quite closed and defensive. Some of my earliest memories of anyone outside of the Greek community are of my nanny, Tryphena, who lived in a room in the backyard of our house. My parents worked long hours at the cafe that my father ran so she would look after me when my mother was at work. She was so warm and affectionate and I really adored her. The only time off she had was on Thursday afternoons. One day I remember her preparing to leave in the afternoon and she was so beautifully dressed. I usually only knew her in her work clothes, an overall, an apron and a cap on her head. I remember this particular time though; she had high heels on and a beautifully fitting red dress and she was so elegant and beautiful and sexy. She said sweetly, ‘Good bye Luli, see you tomorrow,’ and walked out the door. I couldn’t help myself, I followed her, I couldn’t bear to see her go. We must have walked about two blocks, I was behind her not saying a word. When she came to the bus stop she turned around and saw me and her whole face suddenly changed. She became angry and shouted, ‘What are you doing? Go back at once! I’m not going to take you with me. Just go back!’ I was devastated and felt so hurt, not at all understanding that this one afternoon was her very precious, only a few hours of freedom and escape from our house.”

My father, once captain of the rugby team, doing handstands in his rugby uniform



“At the age of 13 I was sent to boarding school. I was desperately homesick, separated from my mother and father in this totally alien world. It was rough and often violent. There was a system that was called ‘running the gauntlet’. You’d have five or six boys on each side, they’d line up and you had to run through and you could hit the guy with anything you had, a cricket bat, a stick, or even a brick and people would do that, especially if there was something different about the guy, then they could seriously hurt the person. There was a very violent masculinity there that in order to survive in a sense you had to become part of, either tacitly or actively. I found it deeply compromising and unsettling.”

My mother at her wedding reception when she was 19



“One day, when I was 18 we went to a Greek dance in the city hall. A man came up to request a dance and I recognised him from a week before when I won a raffle at the Greek club. He was the pharmacist my mother had mentioned a few days before. We began to dance and he said: ‘I was so struck by you, I want to ask for your hand in marriage.’ I was a bit taken aback. This was my first time I was meeting him. ‘Actually I’m in love with someone else,’ I told him. We spent the rest of the dance in silence.”

My mother on her wedding day aged 19



“My parents had heard from him what I had said and they were outraged. The young man I was in love with was a cafe owner like my father, whereas I was getting a university education and could be marrying a pharmacist. There was a huge confrontation that evening. I declared, outrageously for the Greek culture at that time, that I would either marry the man I loved or not marry at all. My father disappeared and came back with a revolver in his hand and said, ‘If you contemplate marrying him I’m going to kill him and then I’ll kill myself.’ A few days later I was allowed to go to the library where I met my love secretly. We had a tearful farewell. It was taken for granted that I would become engaged to the pharmacist. I had no other option unless I wanted to be exiled to Greece. I was married three months later at the age of 19.”

My father at 17 about to set off on a trip hitchhiking across Europe and the Middle East



“My big first shift in how I saw the world was going overseas and hitchhiking in Europe and the Middle East in 1960 when I was 17. That’s what transformed my life. Travelling on my own I had to adapt and observe. I noticed things that were new to me and distinctive. We were travelling on the edge of colonialism. Egypt was already independent. We travelled back down to South Africa via boat, stopping off at ports along the east African coast. In Mombasa I met a young Kenyan man that belonged to the Kenyan African National Union, who was telling me about his desire for independence from British colonial rule. When we arrived back in Durban, I remember driving back with my family and it was the height of a state of emergency; there were soldiers everywhere. Suddenly I was looking at the country through different eyes. My consciousness had started to evolve, an awareness was emerging.”

My mother aged 21



“I was 23 years old and had joined the ANC. After the 1960 state of emergency, which was declared after the killings of Sharpeville in which 69 people were shot dead during a peaceful protest, we met and decided to work in pairs, some at night and some in the daytime. We went up Anstey’s building, the tallest building in Johannesburg city centre, and because we were white we could just take the lift right to the top floor. We had packets of leaflets saying that this was the time now for whites to realise there must be change, the only solution was democracy for all. I had a whole packet of leaflets and I threw them all down over the streets from the top of the roof. Hundreds of them gently floated into the busy city streets below.”

Image from Alexia Webster’s Contact Tracing



“After the massacre in Sharpeville in 1960, every week we would hear news of people being arrested, detained and tortured. Increasingly, there were reports of political activists who disappeared into apartheid’s dungeons, or had managed to escape the country. I was the secretary of the Defence and Aid Fund, and for a few years we had been secretly funnelling people to safe houses and then out of the country. But eventually the underground leadership was captured and sentenced to lifetime imprisonment on Robben Island. I was 27 years old when the special branch came to the school I was teaching at and asked me to go with them. I was held for two days in detention.”

My parents photographed together in the school staff photograph in 1968 before they became a couple



“For a few years after I divorced my husband I taught history at King David high school. I really enjoyed teaching and wouldn’t teach the apartheid curriculum to the students. When my history co-teacher was forced to resign over a statement questioning the validity of Israel’s right to Palestine during the recent six-day war, I pleaded his case but the headmaster dismissed it. ‘I have a wonderful replacement: a captain of the rugby team at university, he’s got an honours degree in history and his name is Eddie Webster.” And of course that’s how I met your father, because of a political upheaval thousands of kilometres away.”

My parents in 1969 in Hogsback. ‘It was the same day as they walked on the moon,’ my mom told me when we were looking at the photos



“That photo was taken in 1969, the same day as they walked on the moon.”

My parents were both teachers for the first part of their careers and met while teaching at a Johannesburg high school in 1968



My father and his father



“1976 was a tough year. I was on bail after I had been arrested for calling for the release of Nelson Mandela. I had to report to the police station twice a week and I was starting to teach a new class and a new course at the university. When they announced by name that these communists had been arrested, my mother had a very serious stroke and nearly died.”

A clipping of a newspaper article announcing my father had been released on bail in 1976



“A year later when we were eventually acquitted and I stood down from my evidence in the court, my father came up to me and said, ‘Eddie, when they arrested you I supported you because you are my son. Now I’ve heard you in the dock and I support you because what you did is right.’ What kept me going in this time was the support of my family and my wife, who was unshaken by this and fully supported me, but also it was the fact that I was intellectually now shaping a whole new political agenda that was to become my life’s work really.”

My mother surrounded by her huge collection of books that she has read over her lifetime



“Through writing my book Gold and Workers I found a voice, one that I was deeply interested in. I was pregnant with you when I started writing my first book. I had forged a new sense of community through the city, and through the common beliefs and values I shared with people of the city. Johannesburg gave me an enormous sense of place and identity. And I got to understand and admire the incredible resilience and creativity and the inventiveness of people who were so crudely oppressed and hideously exploited. I came to understand Ubuntu, that ‘a person is a person through other people’.”

My father in our family home



“It’s interesting reflecting on the past now towards the end of my working life. During the anti-apartheid struggle we had a very clear idea of who the enemy was, it was the system of racial domination and the way in which it gave white people privileges and power at the expense of black people. The virus now is starting to raise questions that are quite fundamental and deeper than have ever been confronted before in this country. Namely that we are not in this together, we are actually experiencing this pandemic in a very different way. If you are rich and white or if you are black and poor. If you are rich you are living in a comfortable house with clean water and electricity, a regular income, access to a laptop and wifi. So for those around me it’s one kind of experience, loneliness yes, frustration at lack of human contact, yes, but for the majority of the population, particularly those who are in precarious employment, this is devastating. What it has revealed, this pandemic, is the deeply racialised nature of our inequality. There is a wonderful saying by Warren Buffett, who I don’t particularly like, ‘When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked.’ That’s what’s happened, the tide has gone out and we see who’s actually struggling and the deep inequalities that we have inherited from apartheid that haven’t been resolved.” 

Bookshelf loop

 Eddie, 78: “I think on the one hand I feel like I’ve had a rich, active life and quite a fulfilled one. In some ways I’ve added value to other people’s lives as a teacher, writer and an activist. On the other hand I feel the journey is not over and I haven’t quite finished my life’s project. I feel like I’m racing against time.”

 Luli, 83: “As you get older you just adapt to the idea that there is less time, so there is more meaning. It may be the last time so you feel the good things more consciously.”

Dancing Loop

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Prix Pictet was founded in 2008 by the Geneva-based Pictet Group, with the mandate to use photography to move beyond cliche and deliver powerful messages about sustainability to a global audience. Its goal is to uncover photography of the highest order, applied to the social and environmental challenges we face today.

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