For this feature, Zoey Black and Ryan Swart held up a lens to each other. When I reached out to interview them, Swart replied to my questions by email. Black sent me a Google Drive folder.
That’s a fairly accurate introduction to the siblings. Swart’s answers arrive with the same loose curiosity that underpins his photography. He’s interested in people, music, subcultures, and whatever is happening around him — a thread he’s happy to follow wherever it leads. Black, meanwhile, arrives with an entire ecosystem: photography, film, human rights, Ballroom, cultural programming, YouTube, activism and enough material to warrant its own cloud storage.
If you’ve been out to a ballroom event, you’ve undoubtedly seen Black. And if you’ve been around Cape Town’s underground electronic music scene, you’ve definitely seen Swart. Both have most likely seen, and documented, you. You might not know that the two are siblings — Black and Swart don’t exactly advertise this connection, and they have taken very different paths into their creative practices. Though eventually, they both found themselves behind a camera, closely observing the communities they have become a part of.
That instinct started at home. “We grew up in front of the camera,” Black tells me. Their parents were always photographing and documenting their lives from day one, giving both siblings what she describes as “a very intimate relationship with seeing and being seen through a lens.” Today, Black describes herself as a “pleasure-centric, socially-conscious queer renaissance and culture architect”, working across photography, film and cultural platforms, while Swart is a documentary photographer immersed in Cape Town’s music underground.
But how they ended up on the other side of the lens couldn’t be more different. For Swart, it started with his father’s old Minolta X-300. Curious about the technology, he promptly fell down a “Film & Photography” YouTube rabbit hole that he’s been in ever since. He started snapping sneaky shots of friends, sometimes borrowing a camera from Black, before buying his own in 2021. Photography was initially supposed to remain a serious hobby until he came across the work of Montreal photographer Karel Chladek. He was inspired to turn his curiosity into his craft.
“My gut told me that if I worked at it, I could be one of the best music photographers in Cape Town,” he says. So he listened to that intuition, lining up a handful of live shows, club gigs and a house party to shoot. “I’m still there, at the party,” he chuckles.
Swart’s photographs dance like the people in them. Kinetic washes of abstraction, light, and bodies in space, they’re in constant motion. His are some of the most immersive documents of Cape Town’s nightlife scene in recent years, and that’s exactly Swart’s intent. Before photography, he was already spending too much time people watching. “Now it’s my job,” he says.
Memory has become part of what he is trying to capture, too. “Our memory incorporates all our senses,” he explains, “but photography being a strictly visual medium has to employ visual techniques to communicate what your other senses might have experienced.” For Swart, the photograph isn’t simply a record of what happened. “Capturing only the visual facts creates an incomplete memory.”
It’s an instinct Black recognises, too. “Oh, I’m deeply inspired by Ryan’s work,” she says. “He has an incredible way of capturing the feeling and energy of a moment.” She’s tried to bring some of that sensibility into her own photography and filmmaking.
Black’s route into documentation began somewhere more personal. When she came out as trans in 2016, there were few accessible South African narratives that could help her make sense of her own experience. She needed to see herself reflected in the world, and when those reflections were hard to find, she began making them herself. “I really didn’t fuck with the way we being represented in most media,” she says. “I think part of what I was doing with my blogging and YouTube vlogs was providing an alternative, affirming narrative to my trans siblings. So that they didn’t feel isolated and alone.”
Four years later, after changing her name with the Department of Home Affairs, she posted about the process on Instagram. Her DMs popped off. “People started asking me how I did it, so I shot a ‘How to’ YouTube video. Then people started asking for more, so I ended up creating a proper YouTube channel.” The videos opened doors into professional film and video work, with photography eventually becoming another foundation of her practice.
While Swart found his craft through curiosity, Black found hers through necessity. But neither is particularly interested in dropping into a space, getting their shot, and leaving. They document from within. For Swart, documenting a culture means “actually being part of it,” he says. “Spending time in it, and engaging with that community.” He has been part of Cape Town’s dance music scene years before he began photographing it. “It shows in the work when you’re photographing something you don’t understand,” he says. “Substance supersedes aesthetics.” Black is more direct about the consequences of getting that relationship wrong. “I think too many artists just drop in to extract value from communities that they know nothing about,” she says. “I make it a point to only shoot people and communities I’m connected to.” For her, consent and dignity are everything.
As active members of the communities they document, both siblings understand when to put the camera down. “Yoh, I tend to get hyper-focused when I work, so I have to remind myself that not everything needs to be captured,” Black says. “When people say: ‘You just had to be there’? – THAT!” That idea of being there is central to Swart’s work. “When I look at a photo,” he says, “I want to feel like I’m there.”
Once you start thinking about photography as archiving memory, the question of what gets remembered — and what doesn’t — becomes unavoidable. Both Black and Swart are concerned with the smaller social histories of people, parties and communities that can disappear almost as quickly as they were created. Swart points to the places that shaped his understanding of Cape Town’s music scene that have since come to pass: “Slow Down was the warmest dance-floor in the city. It was the reason I pivoted from events photographer to documentarian. It showed me that there was so much more depth and interconnectedness to this scene that deserved my longer-term focus.”
He also remembers One Park — or “the nexus and incubator of music culture in Cape Town,” as he describes it — as well as Search Festival and The Other Radio. “Steamy summer nights will never be the same,” he says. “But the scene now feels fragmented into micro-genre mini-scenes, and we’re missing the institutions and infrastructure that brought it all together.”
Black sees other gaps in what gets remembered. “Lesbian/sapphic spaces, events, and culture have been erased from our scene in Cape Town. I’m focusing more on this. Disabled people are also hugely underrepresented.” And while there have never been more images of our lives, Swart questions how much of that imagery will actually survive as memory. “Social media is not an archive. The over-abundance of imagery has devalued it. The apps and tiny screens we consume imagery through affects the way we make photography. They favour simple compositions, single subjects. Depth and complexity are their enemy and audiences are following suit.”
For Black, there’s another problem with what becomes visible and who gets to benefit from that visibility. “Lots of queer culture and ball culture has been picked up by the mainstream in a superficial, extractive way,” she says. “But I’m here for the reclamation happening from within the community.”
“I think people don’t realise how much work and care goes into producing events and holding a scene together,” Swart says. “Our scene is struggling, it survives because there are a handful of passionate people who sacrifice their time, energy and money, probably at a loss.” Black wants to see less of the “overly curated, big money, ego-driven things” and more “people-centred, pleasure-driven, embodied experiences.” Her Erotic as Resistance series, photographed over three years, is the work she is proudest of. “I hope in 20 years people will continue to be inspired by and turned on by this collection,” she smiles. Swart is similarly bringing together everything he has photographed over the past four years into a larger project documenting “how the scene was in the post-COVID years.”
Their advice to anyone wanting to pick up a camera is simple. “Just start,” says Swart. “You’ll learn the ropes as you go. But don’t forget the huge responsibility you’re taking on.” Black has her own instructions: “Put your phone down. Pick up a camera. Even if it’s a little cheap second-hand from the 2000s. There is something that will activate when you hold something different in your hands. Start small and fuck around – there’s nothing better than to play.”
For both of them, that’s ultimately what their work comes down to. Remembering that people were here, making things, finding each other, dancing, fucking around and having a good time. “When someone sees one of my photos decades from now,” says Swart, “I want them to see that [our community] tried to savour and enhance this city’s flavour while the capitalists tried to bleach and sell it.”
Black requires considerably fewer words: “It was good here by the queers.”
The archives that Black and Swart are creating are not far off from self-portraits. These are their people, too. They are documenting while participating. And if you happen to spot either sibling doing exactly that while you’re out, say “hi!” and buy them a drink. Swart will probably be sweating somewhere in the crowd or behind the booth, so get the man some water. Black, on the other hand, will take “a whisky with a little flirt on the side, please.”
Same colour, different shades.
All photography of Zoey Black by Ryan Swart. All photography of Ryan Swart by Zoey Black.
