Weird, wild and wonderful shots of everyday Cape Town

Weird, wild and wonderful shots of everyday Cape Town
The Travel Diary — In his ongoing photography project, Hometown Blues, Duran Levinson fuses portraiture and street shots to capture the day-to-day oddities of his hometown.

Cape Town is a beautiful city right on the Southern tip of Africa – a melting pot of deeply rooted traditions and cultures. It is an old city transitioning into the future, slowly. It also has a small population that literally has too much talent for its own good.

South Africa can have a reputation as a dangerous place with crazy people – and although there is crime, and all the other factors that come with a completely broken political system – people are super friendly and are happy to help you. You just need to have your wits about you, and not go exploring specific areas on your own, or without a local guide.

Hometown blues is a collection of photographs focused on Cape Town – the place in which I grew up and still call home. They were taken over the past three years, exclusively on 35mm film, in various parts of the province.

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The project is an ongoing series to show the absurdities of everyday life in South Africa. Without putting too much thought into it and just capturing these moments, I hope to give a small glimpse into the realities and struggles that people face here.

I would call this project more of a street photography experiment mixed with basic portraiture. I love to capture the vibrancy of my hometown, and I’m always looking for interesting ways to portray places and faces I see often. Sometimes it can be very difficult to connect to a place you have grown up in, but every time I leave the region for work or holidays, I come back to feel revitalised.

A camera is a tool I use to tell stories – I like to give the viewer an image that they can interpret for themselves. I like to have fun with street photography and show the quirky and not-so-seen images of cities, again mainly in South-Africa. I think having the advantage of being an outsider in my own country and seeing these areas helps me to capture it in an honest or raw perspective.

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See more of Duran Levinson’s work on his official website, or follow him on Instagram.

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