Free The Bang-Bang Club by Greg Marinovich Page B

meeting. It was the last meeting before Christmas and like everyone at the dinner table, he had a cracker to pull. Inside Joao’s was a toy machine-gun. He saw it as an omen; within weeks he put together a portfolio of his best pictures and approached Reuters, Britain’s global wire service, persuading them to let him submit pictures on spec. For a few months he balanced the two: shooting the dull pictures that earned his salary at the paper and covering the burgeoning township war after hours and on the weekends, selling the pictures to Reuters. One day, the Alberton Record ’s editor called him in to ask why the paper’s car had been seen in Soweto. Realizing he could no longer balance both jobs, Joao quit the paper to freelance full-time for Reuters.
    Joao’s pictures on the wire were earning him a name as a conflict photographer, but a new picture editor for Reuters was coming in and the word was that he was going to get rid of the present stringers to set up his own network. Joao took his portfolio in to The Star to try to get a full-time job. While the Sunday picture editor was rather distractedly paging through the prints, Ken came over and looked over his shoulder and on seeing the picture of the woman being attacked in Thokoza, said, ‘Hey, I heard about that!’ though he seemed not to recall bumping into Joao on the day that the picture had been taken. Joao began to string for the Sunday Star and was still selling pictures to Reuters.

    In August 1991, Ken was named chief photographer at The Star ; one of the first things he did was hire Joao, the hotshot young photographer who was bringing great pictures back from the war in the townships. It had taken Joao just nine months to move from covering Rotary meetings to being The Star ’s most exciting photographer. Ken and Joao became close friends as Joao became Ken’s ally in his struggle to improve the paper’s moribund photographic department.
    Joao’s beat was almost exclusively the political violence in the townships. His eager recklessness to go into any situation for a picture and his custom of not shaving for days on end, as well as treating management and danger alike to his ‘fuck you’ attitude, ensured he fitted the part of conflict photographer well. But he maintained a certain equilibrium. He had made a home with an acerbically witty girl three years his junior - Vivian Innes. She was just 17 when they first met in a nightclub where he was a bouncer. She had come from her matric party and looked sexy in a short black sleeveless dress. Some time later, Joao received a Valentine’s card from Viv. He sent her flowers a few days later; from then on they were a couple and she moved in with him some time after he moved to Johannesburg. Over the years, they had accumulated a collection of orphaned cats which they both doted on. A friend once described Joao as ‘Mr War-photographer who just melts all over his cats.’
    Johann Greybe ran a small hole-in-the-wall camera shop in Hillbrow. Because he was always willing to give good prices and technical advice to struggling young photojournalists, we all ended up buying second-hand cameras from him - the cameras that I had used to shoot the execution pictures came from him. Johann remembers Joao as the most enthusiastic young photographer he has ever met; extremely energetic and driven to have his picture on the front page. Ken was the ultimate professional. The camera dealer’s impression of Kevin was that he was too sensitive for this world: ‘He was one of the photographers who got nightmares and saw spooks.’ And me? I was level-headed, he said, the one who had his shit the most together.

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    BANG-BANG
    I lament with sorrow and cry because the boys are finished. The boys are finished
    Traditional Acholi funeral song

    We were all white, middle-class young men, but we went to those unfamiliar black townships for widely differing reasons and with contrasting approaches; over the years, we would find