Kyle: I'm in Amsterdam. I've been living here for two-and-a-half years. Before that, I lived in Cape Town for a good seven years. And I was born in Namibia, so I lived there for the first 18 years of my life before heading over to South Africa.

Mo: Was the transition to Amsterdam bigger than the transition to South Africa?

Kyle: I'd say no, only because I've gotten to travel quite a lot. I'd seen Europe and actually came here in 2016, I believe, for the first time with a tube of prints on my back. I was just rolling into galleries trying to promote my work. I guess because I had been here quite a bit and traveled to the states with my parents, it seemed like an easy transition for me to make. The transition from Namibia to South Africa seemed bigger even though those societies are quite interlinked in many ways.

Mo: In what ways were they different?

Kyle: I guess the scale of things. I grew up in Windhoek, Namibia where everything sort of happens behind high walls and closed doors. Then I moved to Stellenbosch with a massive student population, where all of a sudden I had the freedom to do whatever the hell I pleased. [laughing] Culturally, it's quite different. We have seven or eight national languages in Namibia and however many in South Africa, so it's this melting pot of African cultures. I still call South Africa home in some ways but I'm starting to go back less and less as time progresses.

Mo: Where was your family born?

Kyle: My mom is American and she's from Indiana.

Mo: Woah! [both laughing]

Kyle: It's funny because I don't think I ever realized that until a couple years ago where I started to speak about where my mom's from. Everybody sort of responds the same. What the fuck is out there? [both laughing] She left when she was about 7-years-old because her parents got divorced. Her dad is American and her mom is German so when they got divorced she and her mother moved over to Namibia since it was a former German colony. And my dad is South African; his heritage is from the UK.

Mo: I'm assuming that your mom is white and your dad is black?

Kyle: Both white! It's a funny conversation to be had, actually. So often, because of the work that I make, especially in the U.S., I find that I walk into meetings and people would be somewhat surprised. They realize that I'm Kyle. To me, it's kind of obvious because “Kyle Weeks” is kind of a white name to have. [both laughing]

Mo: How about the people that you photograph, especially in Africa? Is that something they're conscious of?

Kyle: To be honest it's always different, Mo. For instance, in Africa, people somehow always make the assumption that I'm American, so there's no way for me to blend in, in some of the spaces that I photograph in. So many of the people are like, “You're white, there's no way you were born in Africa.” But it's a conversation that I enjoy having with people because I align myself as much as being African as I do with my European or western roots to put it that way. It's definitely something that drives my practice, like this conversation.

Kyle: As much as I associate myself with being African, obviously from my outward physical appearance, that's not so obvious. So it's just really about looking at this position of being an African of western descent and asking whose story do I get to tell? 

Kyle: It's also looking at the broader history of white photographers on the African continent and how they’ve depicted the people and the place. I guess that all really became apparent to me while I was studying photography in South Africa, and then that sort of just stuck. It felt like a great foundation for me to build work on.

Mo: What concepts do you want to explore that you haven't had the chance to before?

Kyle: There was a time during my studies where I was overly concerned with looking at ethics of representation and ethics in documentary image-making, especially having studied in South Africa where there's a clear lineage of photojournalism—obviously because of apartheid being such recent history. I found myself veering in that direction spending a lot of time walking through townships and photographing people subjected to difficult living conditions.

Kyle: It was a moment in time where obviously these things are happening and these stories need to be told but that's what we're so used to seeing. When I spent time in these communities I just found that there was also so much positivity and expression happening, be it sports, fashion, or performance. I sort of reached this moment of, “Why is nobody telling these stories?” 

Kyle: During that time, I spent so much time trying to write my thoughts down, which is important even if you work in a visual industry. It almost became paralyzing where I thought I needed this grand idea to go out and make work and it has to be well-explained. It got to a point where I wasn't taking pictures anymore at all.

Mo: And this was while you were in school?

Kyle: When I was in school the classes were helping me facilitate my research so it came a bit more naturally then, but when I left school I wasn't spending as much time reading and researching. I got to a point where I hadn't made any photos and became really unhappy. I needed to be out taking pictures to be happy. 

Kyle: I remember assisting a South African photographer by the name of David Southwood, and at the time he said to me to pick up the camera and just walk around. You find something along the way that could lead to your next project so it was a year-and-a-half where I was pretty much walking around the streets aimlessly and doing street photography. Stepping back from the writing element, I realized that I wanted to create this framework for myself that's broad and everything falls within that. It's a simple message that I'm trying to tell.

Mo: What did the climate look like in university? How did that influence your idea of a photo community?

Kyle: I went to Stellenbosch Academy which is a private institution. The students were predominantly white. There were a couple from Zimbabwe specifically—they weren't massive classes—but it was an 80/20 split. The city itself is super conservative driven but that was interesting to be aware of. The work that the students from Zimbabwe were making spoke so much closer to me than what the others made. 

Kyle: It was about looking at the history of photography within South Africa but also Africa as a whole, and noticing that none of my classmates were really engaging with this. Everybody was sort of engaging with their immediate personal histories. I didn't have anything within my history that I found interesting enough to follow.

Kyle: My dad is a crazy outdoorsman so he took me to these camping expeditions in northern Namibia which is where I shot my first body of work. Those sorts of things in my life are what really then influenced me to go down this path that I'm on now.

Mo: My grandfather, who lived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had an architecture and engineering practice. But that was the furthest scope of creativity in our family, especially given the region they lived in, so I'm curious about your family's response to you deciding this practice.  

Kyle: My dad used to be a hobbyist photographer so me running that by him wasn't a complete shock. It's something that he really enjoyed doing, but he didn't know that you could actually make a career out of it.  

Kyle: It's funny because I don't think my parents fully know the extent of what I'm doing. They've been super supportive and we have a really good relationship, so when I expressed my interest in doing this they were fully supportive on every level. Without a doubt, I wouldn't be where I am if it weren't for their support, especially financially. It's an expensive game that we're playing, at least to start out.

Kyle: I never thought that I'd go down this direction. I remember being 17-years-old and having no clue what I wanted to do with my life.

Mo: What was the most obvious choice at that time?

Kyle: Oh, man. I used to go to all kinds of aptitude tests because if it were up to me, I would've tried to make a career in skateboarding because that was the one thing in my life that was constant from when I was 12-years-old up until two years ago. My parents were pretty worried to be honest. I was also pretty misbehaved so I think they were worried in general.

Kyle: Going to these aptitude tests, they all came back with the same results: “You're a people's person so you should work with people. Why don't you do a degree in business management?” So for a while, I thought these people must know what they're talking about which let me keep my options open.

Kyle: At the time, I met a woman by the name of Leigh Daniz who moved to Namibia to establish a commercial studio there. She just rocked up one day and started taking pictures of my friends and myself skateboarding on the streets and we just hit it off and became pretty good friends. She told me that if I wanted to learn more about photography, she'll gladly give me lessons in her studio. Honestly, I'm so grateful for having met her because she opened my eyes to this medium. After doing lessons with her for half a year, I was like, “Alright, this is what I want to do.”

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]

Mo: Seeing this continued growth in your career, do you feel the responsibility of your work has changed a little bit?

Kyle: Definitely. Initially, my audience was so much more local, but now it's obviously more global. It's an interesting one because you don't want to be pigeonholed—which is easily done in this industry—but at the same time, you can't jump around because people can be easily confused. I feel a responsibility but I don't feel the pressure to continue down the exact same trajectory or narratives that I've sort of been investigating from the start. Obviously smaller, more micro-narratives might develop within the overarching theme. I feel like I've found something that I'm good at, and there's going to be moments where I'm going to feel the need to reinvent myself, but it can always live within this realm.

Mo: And it's still a new feeling. 

Kyle: Exactly! It's also so personal to me, man. My work is so reflective of the headspace I'm in when I'm out in these foreign countries or communities that are quite removed from my own. It doesn't come from outside sources. 

Kyle: I'm also often not going out with a prescribed idea of exactly what I'm trying to capture. I've just created a simple guideline for myself that leads my work, whether editorially, commercially, or personal. It's all guided by the same thing. 

Kyle: All I want to do within photography is to create representation and likenesses of people that they would feel super proud to look at. Like, okay, I'm a white male, and if you look at the history of photography within Africa, it’s a tool that was predominantly used by white men to reinforce stereotypes and ideas of this place and its people.

Kyle: Now, globally, and within Africa by African practitioners and people across the continent, it's been now recognized as a tool to empower people and reclaim identity. Again, looking at my position as a white male with a camera walking in cultures that are removed from my own, I just want to keep the baseline as me trying to create positive representation.

Mo: Do you feel like you get the opportunity to involve people who've been representative of this idea through collaborative efforts, whether in a production or client sense? 

Kyle: Now, more and more, I'm working within Europe and it's been a while since I've been back to any African country. I think commercially that's a whole different ball game. Editorially, at least, I think the two stories I shot at the beginning of 2019 for i-D and M le Monde [support that]. I had shown Ibrahim Khamara the personal work I was doing in Ghana, and he was so inspired by the characters I was capturing that he wanted to go there and create these stories for them. We got a local producer and we casted everybody locally, like the models. So yes, I definitely do feel that now more than ever I have the opportunity to be able to involve people in this process. 

Kyle: Generally, these are also people who are driven wanting to tell the same stories. A lot of people have started to reach out to me because of exactly that and then I get asked to do a variation of that same story. Also, it's a matter of collaborating with the people who I'm photographing, at least in Ghana with the work I've been doing out there for four years which hasn't been released yet. It's about asking them, “How do you wish the outside world would see you?” There are moments of apprehension, which I get greeted with a lot of the time, but I think it quite quickly turns to more of an intrigue and want to participate. 

Kyle: I'm often out in Ghana for a month at a time, so I'll have really shitty days out there where when I walk out with my camera, the first person I ask to photograph will respond in a way that I didn't need to hear. But I'm also aware that I will get no's and I'm going to get crazy looks. That's completely okay because, especially within Africa, the camera is not nearly as ubiquitous as it is in the western world. 

Kyle: When I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo this year and last, there was no fucking way that I was going to walk around with a camera and take pictures freely. You also understand why because with places like that are notoriously misrepresented. The first thing I get asked is what news channel I'm working for. They immediately expect you to photograph someone living on the street.