Lee-Ann Olwage and the camera as an instrument

Lee-Ann Olwage’s work translates into still photography the lives and labour of women whose stories are often footnoted and forgotten. So it make sense that she was recently named a Global Grant winner of the Fujifilm GFX Challenge Grant Program, joining four other photographers worldwide.

It’s a good prize — $10,000 (about R162,000), a Fujifilm GFX System camera and lenses. But the real reward is time, trust and distance. Olwage travels this week to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco to complete Weaving Stars and Palm Leaves, a project two years in the making, photographing Amazigh women who are guardians of an ancient rug-making tradition. “I’m beyond thrilled,” she says, with the kind of understatement that suggests she’s already been mentally packing. “I’m excited to shoot with the Fujifilm GFX System over the course of the next year to explore the rich capabilities of large-format storytelling.”

Advocacy and education is needed in order to support communities in caring for the elderly and understanding old age conditions and cognitive impairment. Inclusive discussions about dementia in Africa are essential if policymakers and key stakeholders are to improve the wellbeing of people with dementia and their caregivers in their global plan to improve the lives of people living with dementia. (Lee-Ann Olwage)

If that sounds technical, Olwage’s work never is. Her subjects are human before they’re visual. The Amazigh women she wants to photograph don’t merely make rugs; they encode lives and stories into them. “They weave the essence of their identity, their connection to nature and their spiritual journeys,” Olwage explains. The rugs become maps — memory, belief and geography — drawing inspiration directly from the surrounding landscape, its colours, rhythms and silences.

It’s not ethnographic tourism. Olwage’s gaze has always been rigorous and ethical, shaped by years documenting women across the African continent. Her work is intimate without being intrusive.

One of the judges, Amanda Maddox, notes Olwage’s “deep commitment to documenting women’s stories,” calling this project “a sensitive, informative exploration of tradition, gender relations and environmental concerns.” It’s the sort of praise that recognises intent as much as outcome.

Climate change threads its way into the project. The Atlas Mountains are warming faster than the lowlands, and with environmental disruption comes cultural fragility. “The continuation of the rug-making tradition becomes more crucial,” Olwage says, pointing to the weavers’ knowledge of natural dyes, materials and seasonal rhythms as a blueprint for sustainable living.

Ruth Dodo floats in the ocean at sunset off the coast of Paje Zanzibar. Women in Zanzibar rarely learn how to swim. They visit the beach to hunt, forage and harvest but not often to play. At sunset it is often men that come to the beach to exercise and swim. (Lee-Ann Olwage)

Olwage will shoot with the Fujifilm GFX100RF, a rangefinder-style, 102-megapixel camera she already knows intimately. “I’ve always been a big fan of the compact nature of the GFX100RF,” she says, praising its colour fidelity, cinematic quality and tactile dials. It’s a photographer’s answer: precise, practical, quietly passionate.

Awards, for Olwage, aren’t new territory. She’s a multiple World Press Photo winner, among a shelf of other international accolades, and only the second South African to receive this Global Grant. Olwage remains committed to something slower and braver than spectacle: attention.