

Mo: We touched on this a little, but where in your life have you felt the most uncertain about your career and how did you navigate that?

Kyle: While I was studying I never considered commercial photography of any sort, really. I was more inspired by Guy Tillim, Zanele Muholi, and Pieter Hugo—these people who were making work destined for a wall in a gallery who were making a career of that. My main ambition was to produce individual bodies of work that would then be shown and sold. At the time I was super naive. I had no idea that it takes a super long time to build up a career for yourself like that.

Kyle: I guess the biggest difficulty was leaving university and having two years where me and all my best friends now, who I met in college, weren't doing anything, man. We were trying to do personal projects here and there but wondering, “How do you actually make a living in photography?” That was also the time when I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to make a big body of work, to the point where I sort of stopped taking pictures at all. So I was assisting, and breaking into the assisting realm in South Africa is quite tricky because it's super saturated.

Mo: There's a healthy amount of work to exist as a photographer in South Africa, yes?

Kyle: Massively. I think Cape Town specifically is overly saturated with photographers but also people trying to break into the industry, be it assisting or whatever road they can take. So my friends put our heads together and founded a crew agency that is still running. We wanted to create a bit of a name around the four of us, so we created “Cape Collective Assist”. I'm not as active in it as I was, but five years later we now outsource work to 60 plus people. So that got me into assisting fashion photographers who were producing some questionable content for three years. [both laughing] You know, backlit smiles and bikinis on the beach. Not all of it was bad, of course.

Mo: Now that's photography. [both laughing]

Kyle: There were elements to that which kind of appealed to me, but then there were most elements that I didn't like. It gave me the thought that I could work as a commercial photographer but if I'm going to do it then I'm not going to do it this way. So I was faced with this idea of, “How do I break into this?" Assisting brought in enough cash to sustain my personal projects, like the Ovahimba Youth Self Portrait project up in northern Namibia. That was my first personal body of work that then got exhibited.

Kyle: So I felt like, oh wow, I'm on the right track. I'm showing my work at these South African fairs and slowly but surely there was interest building on my personal work, so I wanted to work commercially. The photographers I assisted introduced me to agencies, specifically Webber, and when I saw that for the first time, I just had this “aha!” moment where I went, “This is the route I want to go.” These dudes are making personal work and are getting commissioned off the back of that. You can't really tell the difference between their commissioned and their personal work so that seemed like the sweet spot to be in.

Kyle: I became more focused and approached people on the street that were well dressed and expressing themselves through style. I asked them to either take their picture right there and then, or I arranged to meet them another time and make their pictures. So that's how I started to build fashion work.

Kyle: I did that for a good couple of months and got the attention of one local stylist in South Africa and we made this little commission to shoot for a local streetwear brand and it sort of snowballed a little bit. To be honest, I still don't know how exactly it happened but I just kept on that mission and kept street casting people. There's my long answer to your question. [both laughing]