From January to May 2013, Katharine Cooper returned to the land of her birth to document a subject shrouded in ignorance and taboo — the White Africans. For several months she travelled to the various locations linked to her childhood, in both South Africa and Zimbabwe. The aim of the series was to counteract the one or two stereotypes of White people in South Africa which outsiders and even South Africans themselves might have. The faces and stories of the people photographed would help to re-humanise the concept, rounding it out with plenty of realities, such as the face of White poverty, the White celebrity, the White middle class, the White family…

Katharine Cooper, born in 1978 in Grahamstown, South Africa’s Eastern Cape, moved at a young age to Zimbabwe, where she completed her schooling. In 1998, she travelled to the United Kingdom to pursue her studies in photography, before finally landing at the Arles National School of Photography.