Learning to Be Present
Written by Bela Rusconi
One of the most dangerous things about living in Cape Town is becoming indifferent to its incredible beauty. For example: I’ll be walking in Rondebosch Common, with the last rays of the sun streaming over the mountain, the wind blowing through the grasses, and my mind will be on something totally unromantic like whether I should make stir fry tonight or on Thursday. Back in Joburg, a vast, industrial metropolis where the pace is fast and the pothole improvements slow, my whole week would be made by a single tree-lined street.
I have experienced something similar in my work in fashion photography. For so many years my absolute dream, my hope and my motivation, was to work in a beautiful space creating beautiful things with beautiful people. Now I’m here, and all I can think about is soya sauce and red cabbage. It’s not that I don’t love what I do and finding it interesting and fulfilling, it’s just that I’ve become used to the glamour and forget to see it for the excitement that it is.
I began working in fashion three and a half years ago, when I signed with a modelling agency in Joburg. Not long after I started a degree in photography and graphic design with the goal of becoming a professional fashion photographer. Fashion has been one of my primary interests for several years. I love the worlds we can create in fashion, its centrality in popular culture (and therefore in popular thought), the tremendous care and heart poured into a garment, a character, a photoshoot, an editorial, a campaign... I have found great joy and purpose in being useful on set; having an opinion that matters, and in being able to contribute to popular culture and popular taste. I experienced the South African fashion industry first through my modelling work, and through my work as art director of a student-run magazine, and then in the shoots that I began photographing, working alongside models, makeup artists and stylists who I met during my time in front of the camera.
Upon completing my degree at the end of 2022, I moved down to Cape Town to continue my modelling career and explore the fashion industry further. What an eye-opening experience it has been, working with people and brands that I really admire! It’s been strange getting used to the pace of my new home - Cape Town is generally considerably more laid back, but its summer season, when the city overflows with thousands of international clients and creatives, is incredibly overwhelming for even the most seasoned Capetonian, let alone a newbie. But after a couple of months, the concerns of day-to-day creative work become less novel, and one is free to devote one’s spare time to making dinner plans.
This new stage of my life has brought so many new joys and challenges. I’m trying to be healthy in the way I approach these new paradoxes - the disparity between my dreams and their reality, between work and rest, the beautiful and the everyday. I’d like to be able to look back someday and feel confident that I threw myself into each experience wholeheartedly - that I saw as many sunsets, shot as many shoots, and rounded the Common as many times as I possibly could.
