Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with the director and editor of the documentary film Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Director Raoul Peck won the Cannes Golden Eye Award and was nominated for a Palme d’or. He was nominated for a DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. He won a BAFTA, an Emmy and was nominated for an Oscar and an Independent Spirit Award for his previous film, I Am Not Your Negro.

Editor Alexandra Strauss has been nominated for three Cinema Eye Honors Awards for Outstanding Achievement in editing including one for this film and two more for films you’ll hear about in the interview: I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes.

Raoul and Alexandra, welcome to Art of the Cut. Thank you so much for joining me. 

PECK: Thank you for the invitation.

STRAUSS: Thank you. Nice to be here.

So much of a documentary is made in the editing room. Raoul, how do you - as a director - collaborate with your editor? 

PECK: I think that has evolved depending on who the editor is. My particular story with Alexandra is we have done eight films together not counting the three previous films before where she was the assistant of Martine Barraqué, with whom I did also a numbers of films.

So it’s almost like a family story. I think our work together evolved to a stage where we have a lot of shortcuts. We don’t need to discuss all of that. It’s also about learning to know each other, basically, and establishing some sort of trust at many different level, personal, political, historical, in terms of also our respective education and knowledge.

Alexandra is not just an editor. She’s a writer. She wrote books. She watched a lot of films. She’s very familiar with my environment, my life in the third world, my back and forth in the Western world, et cetera. So there are multiple layers.

It’s like becoming a couple really in all senses of the word. Sure she’s married, she has a husband, so it’s not that in that sense, but it’s to a point where we can start a film very early on and I will trust her to leave the space open for me for further thinking - for further developing of the ideas - but she can already start on it and I am never deceived when I let her for a week or two in the editing room and come back and see what she did.

It’s usually, that she caught my deepest thought about the story, a scene, or a character.

What countries are you both from?

PECK: I’m from Haiti. I’m born in Haiti and will always be linked to my home country. 

STRAUSS: I’m French. I’m French from Paris. When we did interviews about Raoul’s last film, I’m Not Your Negro, the journalist was surprised that I was not American, or African-American. She couldn’t understand that I had made this work. 

Raoul was talking about your collaboration method. Would you care to expound on that? 

STRAUSS: What’s great about working with Raoul is that he gives me his trust and confidence, so that gives me great freedom to be more creative. If every window is open, you can propose things. So I’ve gotten to know him better after a few films and it works well now. 

There are many ways to do a documentary. Some are verite. Some are less scripted or more scripted. How was this film was constructed?

PECK: I basically have a construction in my head, even before we go in. One thing I learned over the years is to keep control of the story I am telling. It’s a strategy somewhere between writing a narrative screenplay and a documentary.

They’re totally mixed in the way we approach documentary. In narrative you have to be in control of your story. You’re in the control of the characters. You are in control of what happened to the characters. You’re in control of the characters’ feelings, their emotions, their decisions, et cetera. So in documentary, I feel that I need that too. 

That’s why very early in my documentary work I eliminated talking heads. That’s not the way I construct my films. With the type of stories I’m making, I want that aspect of control. Artistic control, narrative control, dramatic control are key.

The editing process goes hand in hand. So we have a tremendous capacity of creativity, of trying new ways to tell a story, etc. Because we are not stuck with whatever we found in terms of interviews. So my films are very conceptual from the get-go while retaining a lot of flexibility.

What is important is that very early on, Alexandra and I, got enough of the deeper feeling of what the film is. Then we’ll let our imagination go as we get more archive and more writing from me. I can hand one page to Alexandra one day and she works one week on it and I can hand her 20 pages.

So we build up as we go in a very organic process. 

Alexander, talk to me about that organic process. Raoul’s talking about having such control over the story. How much of that control is early, and how much of it changes over the course of the editing?

STRAUSS: What’s also great about working with Raoul is that when he begins to make a film, he knows why he’s doing it. So the intentions are very clear.

So from that, it’s a good base that you are not looking for making a story about something and you don’t really know where you are going or what the end will be. He already knows what it will be.

For example, for Ernest Cole, It was about this man from South Africa that is going to work in the States, then he has to stay there in exile because he can’t go back.

Then he disappears. And we had historical background that we needed to include from his working years in South Africa, which were the 60s till his death.

So it was all the story of South Africa. There was also a history in the States. So that was also a big chapter. Raoul asked me to go into Ernest’s head during his American life in New York. There were all these photographs that they found of Ernest’s just a few years ago in Sweden, so that’s another line.

Then Raoul gave me all this voiceover. All the text that Raoul took from Baldwin’s books or articles. We also began to work on what Cole had written or what Raoul got from some interviews. So this text is like a music score and from it I try to make sense.

Every piece of the text become scenes - like in a narrative. I know I have a storyline from South Africa, a New York story, also the present times stories. So these different layers. When it comes to the text, I consider that I have to understand each word because the audience has to understand each word.

So I really try to imagine what kind of image should be with this text, so that it makes it as clear as possible. Also, because it’s cinema, the text has to touch you and to be emotional.

So we have to follow the story from this point of view. The research for images continues throughout, always considering the needs: like clarity of the meaning, being with the character, and other layers.

Often we work with an archives producer, and she’s looking for archives that we ask for. Raoul asks for some things. I try to imagine others. This film is very special because it’s based on photographs. The main material is the photography of Ernest Cole - which was a challenge.

How do you make a film out of it? How do you make it alive? We know that we will have sequences made out of photographs. We will have some archival film and maybe we’ll shoot footage later on. We don’t have everything at the beginning.

We work a long time before it’s beginning to look like something.

Sometime I use archive that will be replaced by footage that we’ll shoot later, so it’s moving all the time. We began to do that with I’m Not Your Negro.

PECK: There are a lot of placeholders early on because I don’t want my ideas to be blocked just because I don’t have the image that I need that fits the moment. For us, we have to be moving. We are in a creative mood so we don’t wat to be blocked. We just put in a placeholder.

That tells us, “It will be more or less this.” It works. So we can move on. We don’t need to procrastinate on that. We always have to be light on our feet. We know the film will change thousand times, so we have to keep moving. It’s like writing a narrative film.

You just need to know, “Okay, the scene will be more or less about this.” But you continue, so you are still in the mood of the flow of the film at this particular moment. 

STRAUSS: When we use images that will be replaced, I use images from other films, or downloaded images from the web. We know that they will be replaced, but what we want is this place or this feeling of this landscape. We are dreaming about what we want and we know it will come later. It’s quite nice. 

You’re using temp images like you would use temp music. 

STRAUSS: Absolutely. It helps to build a story.

PECK: We do that with the music as well. We have the privilege to work with 

Alexei Aigui who has been on at least seven of my films. It’s like having a haute couture composer with us all the time.

We use a lot of his previous music as temp because he’s a very prolific composer and musician. So we always know we are looking for that mood. Sometimes he’s angry with us because he says, “You’re already using my music!

So you want me to do something else?” Seriously, we get along very well. The privilege is that he can do and redo the music to accompany the editing. We can be very precise. The closer we are getting to the end, it becomes very precise and Alexei can still work on it until the recording.

Tell me a little bit about the structure of the film and how much the structure changed as you went through editing and why. 

STRAUSS: From day one, whatever I put on the timeline, I think it’s definitive. Of course, it’s going to change every day, but I edit it as if it was definitive. So I begin with music all the time. I begin the film from the beginning.

Raoul wanted some violence. He wanted that we see how apartheid was in South Africa. That was something I knew that had to be in the beginning. 

PECK: Just like in a narrative film, you need to start hard to put the audience at the core. It’s a film about violence. It’s not just a pretty film about photography. That photography reflects the reality of violence, so we knew we need that from the get-go. 

STRAUSS: We used archival footage of a massacre in South Africa. It was something that Ernest Cole experienced when he was maybe 14 years old.

So it was also logical to go from there. Also, it’s the story of this man who leaves his country to go to America. The first cut was more like South Africa, New York, South Africa. It was… 

PECK: …chronological. 

STRAUSS: Yes. We wanted to have from the beginning, this experience of New York in the seventies that I remember with the feeling of these crowds and what a young man arriving there would feel. So I was looking for this archival crowd of the street.

Also I always use things that I could find from his own photography, because I always wanted to make parallels to places where he could have been. We used a lot of Super 8mm amateur footage from the 70s and early 80s from New York. It was really nice.

I love to watch these amateur things. We found images that are really close to what he made pictures of in Central Park with all these fountains, these people. Comparing this Super 8mm, you can see how unique his vision was: how he frames the world with his camera.

You have to present your character in a way. He was speaking about himself: the way the family lost their house, how he began to work at a photo magazine. All that was in the script. Just by following the script and working with his own photographs, I began to shape the film. That was the first weeks of work.

Can you talk about that process of breaking up the story between South Africa and the United States and realizing that it needs to be more cohesive? For example: staying longer with one, then staying with the other? When you were watching the film in the early stages, how did you come to that realization that drove you to say, “Let’s change this.”

PECK: I have this German idea of “Probieren geht über Studieren”  which means “doing is more important than thinking.” (Editors note: German editor Hansjorg Weibrich thinks the translation is closer to “Stop intellectualizing and just try it.”) So instead of procrastinating, let’s just do it.

NLEs allow you to just do it and see what it is. You don’t need to lose a lot of time for explanation. So we do that a lot, knowing that we can go back to what we had. It’s important to progress like this and we have to be organic and feel the moments: what do we need as a storyteller?

What do we need as a spectator? We always have the audience in our mind as well.

What information did we deliver to the audience up to that moment? What is missing up to that moment? Alexandra and I are good spectators.

I make fun of Alexandra because - after working on the film for months - we look at it and she just explodes laughing as if she’s watching it the first time and it’s always great because I know, “Okay, that’s a keeper!” I cry.

She cries. There is always emotion when we’re watching it. So that’s why keeping it organic is proof it’s working. If we can feel the same emotion again and again, that means the structure is working.

STRAUSS: You had an idea some at some point that you wanted to put the letter in the beginning, which ended up later in the film. That simplified the entry of the film: that he was presenting himself with the letter: “I am an Ernest Cole.

I am in exile. I was born this day.” That was something that changed after the film was easier to see because we had a different beginning in the first cut. We also had to make choices about the history of the bank where they found Ernest’s photographs. and about the mystery of how they got there and how they were discovered.

That used to be a bigger part of the film, but we decided that it was not the heart of the film. This was not a film that would be answer those questions. So we had to delay when we talked about that. It was going later and later in the film.

So the whole story concerning the discovery of his photographs at the Swiss bank was earlier in the film, originally? 

PECK: It was an important part of the story, but we felt that’s not Ernest’s story. The first big decision was that Ernest would be the one telling his own story. He  had been eradicated, and he needed to take power again.

Once you have that, you always have to check: is it Ernest Cole telling his story? It allowed us to concentrate more on the story of Ernest.

We had to feel that we are with him and he’s the one guiding us in that story. It’s the organic process that allows us to feel that as we go. Also, the Swiss bank story cannot come too late in the movie, because then it’s just an appendix.

There is an incredible turning point. In the story at one point where we see a sit-down interview and realize, “That’s Ernest’s nephew!” He allows us to flip the story and to immerse ourselves slowly into a different kind of film, which is much more of a detective story.

But we do it late enough, but early enough so that we can come back to Ernest. It stay his film. All those are things that you need to give the correct “dosage” until it works. 

We always had a board with all the sequence on it with different colors. You can see by the distribution of colors if any part of the story is unequal. 

STRAUSS: The balance of the film.

The colors were story-based? Or emotionally based? Or character based?

STRAUSS: It changes according to the film we’re working on. This film had colors for South Africa, the United States, the footage we shot, and probably also archival footage - which were historical moments. 

PECK: The history of the boycott of South Africa because of apartheid. 

STRAUSS: And a color for Nelson Mandela.

The film was also about photography, so I had fun trying to imagine how to show photography in different ways to feel the moment he takes photo: with a sound and we used a freeze-frame and we used a graphic artist to help.

It was really nice to imagine how to show pictures in the different ways, like using the contact sheet or when we went into color.

PECK: We work as a team with editing, story, graphics, archive person, composer. It’s like really a symphony. So that allows each one on the team to be also creative. There are sequence we work on again and again, like the “color moment.” We knew it had to be an explosion of color.

We knew more or less where it was going to be, but the work on it took many layers working together: Alexandra, the graphic designer, and myself. There is the scene about the pornography shops on 42nd street. We knew it had to be so cool and at the same time funny.

So it’s not a sequence that is just an editing sequence, but it’s the mix of music, editing, graphics, et cetera.

STRAUSS: On this film I had the great joy to research and look for a lot of music. I love jazz but I knew nothing about South African jazz. I did a lot of discovery that I still listen to now. There were a lot of musicians in this generation that went to the States and made great things. Also, some current musicians that we used from South Africa.

The music was a very important in this film to give the mood of New York in the ‘70s. So you could really be in it and feel it by the music and we had the Super8mm archival of the sidewalks with the smoke which was really great. The producers were not so happy that we had so many pieces of music in this film. 

PECK: Another aspect of Alexandra is she’s also an incredible musician herself, so that’s another tool that we have. Actually, we understand each other well in our music taste, so I don’t feel that I have to invent everything myself.

I can really let Alexandra do her own research. She knows we are looking for jazz. Then second, that we want to include South African motifs the most. Even when we chose Duke Ellington, but it’s his song “African Flowers,” so there is direction in our research. I trust Alexandra to do the legwork and I don’t feel that I’m pressured to find everything from my belly.

That’s also an incredible advantage that clears my mind to be a little bit more “in the exterior.” She’s harder on killing our babies which gives me more distance (objectivity) because I’m not in all the research at every moment.

At the beginning of the documentary, it says that every photo -  unless it’s attributed - is Ernest’s. You’ve got some other photographers. Talk to me about finding those pictures from Struan Robertson of Ernest.

PECK: The first research was to find all the existing photos of Ernest Cole, because we knew that we need as many portraits of him as possible. But once we have them, the film being only photos from Ernest Cole, when we use other photos, it was also an homage to all the other photographer, the same way we include the music, and say it’s a tribute to all the African musicians of the time, the whole film is also a sort of homage about the anti-apartheid fight, about the South African artistic legacy-  all the people who were in exile and still keep creating art.

That’s also an important component in the film. 

Basically all the films I make  are about the contextualizing of that on many different layers: not only visual, but also musical, but also artifacts, but also who have created. The reference to all the films is important to me too because it’s part of the narrative and part of the archive and all historical memories.

So it’s a way to create an additional link with the spectator. If you have a clip of a movie that maybe he or she remembers, you bring the whole emotion of that watching 10, 20 years ago into it. It’s a way too, of transparency. That’s key for us: it’s always to be transparent.

To give the magic of cinema, but at the same time, to give the clue and the transparency of the origin, the time, the artists who created those images, et cetera. I don’t just incorporate them and make them my own. No. It’s a collective work, like it’s our collective memory. 

STRAUSS: We had Struan’s photos of Ernest from the beginning because there were not so many portraits of Cole. But there is a series of pictures of Cole - the last pictures that were taken in the 80s by the South African photographer.

At the beginning, we had only two and at the end of the editing, suddenly we discovered that there were maybe 10 pictures of him, so it made us completely change the sequence when they meet in New York because the photos were so amazing.

PECK: Rashid. 

STRAUSS: Rashid Lombard.

PECK: It became one of the beautiful sequences for me. Wee discovered him suddenly as an old man and we rewrote the voice over with what Rashid Lombard told us about that meeting. “The camera is cold” is because he said that to Rashid, so that enables us to rewrite that moment, but through Ernest’s point of view. 

Alexander mentioned that the voiceover was very much like a musical score. How much did it evolve? And how much did you rewrite? Did you record multiple times with the actor? 

STRAUSS: We always work with a “maquette.” (Editor’s note: similar to the English term “scratch track” or “mock up.”) So we have someone just recording the voice for us. In this case, it was Raoul’s brother. It was the same for I’m Not Your Negro.

We had a voice from an American guy from Paris, and we worked till the end of the edit with this “maquette voice.” Then we worked with the actor to record the final. So it’s easy to ask and to add and sometimes write some new pages and I try to put them in.

This gives real freedom to change the text and add things. I was looking at all these contact sheets and suddenly - for example, the sequence of the kiss - there are 12 pictures one after the other. A series. I thought it was really nice.

I used that for the moment when he was saying he was so alone in New York and just imagined this very small scene out of these pictures. It’s not only the text, but also the images, and in this case, it was Ernest Cole’s images.

PECK: It’s a constant back and forth between music, text, and images that creates new stories in between. So we are always on the creative alert to use them and find them.

STRAUSS: But the challenge was that Ernest didn’t take any photos the last 10 years - or fewer than before - so we had to imagine how to tell the story without his pictures, which was the base really of the first South Africa trip.

He photographed everything that he spoke or wrote about. But in the States, there was a moment where the Ford Foundation asked him to travel to the South, so that was some work he did, but after that he was just alone in the city and there was also nothing when he begins to disappear from social life and from the artistic life. So we had to think: what are we going do? So that’s why there is more footage there. 

You mentioned scenes, and that always makes me think that when you’re doing these documentaries, you wonder where to start. What do I do today? What can I work on today that gets this thing further down the line? There are scenes like in South Africa - the one about the household workers that work in the homes of the white people - or I love the one of the women walking the poodles. Talk about building a scene.

STRAUSS: It’s easier when you have a script. It’s really a block of phrases, and you have to make them clear, and you have to find the images. Some of them, we made scenes out of them - like the mines, the nannies.

Ernest’s work is classified by subjects. When Ernest writes to his mother there are no photographs. So I found this picture of Ernest’s where you see a person talking on the phone.

PECK: Or sometimes we have an idea like the Rashomon sequence where you see all those different stories, all those different characters. I knew that was a sequence. We didn’t know yet where exactly, but we do build that type of sequence or scene.

It’s just sheer inspiration or because a particular picture or group of pictures inspires us. Sometimes we know, “This will go toward the beginning or toward the middle or toward the end. That’s always the bigger structure that we have. At the beginning, there are many things like this.

We don’t know exactly where they will go because they can go anywhere. But they have to fit the organic narrative. The more you refine the story the more you know where they go - where they fit.

You mentioned a little bit about the ethics, like you needed to be transparent. Do you have any ethical concerns in telling a story? What guides you about what you should and should not do? 

PECK: There are a lot. I think I have internalized them - and Alexander as well - in the way we work. There are things that we don’t need to talk about or images that can be discriminatory about the subject. The last film, I Am Not Your Negro, when I want to show violence on black people, there are certain violences that are important to watch, but there are others that are unnecessary.

When we did the film Exterminate All the Brutes, there are colonial images of brutality, of rapes, of certain stuff. Sometimes you do have to show the brutality, but you have the choice: Do I show the brutal images or do I try to get some humanity about the victim and not portray the person just as a victim?

So those are ethical choices. Usually one key for us is always to make sure that the subject is looking into the camera. That means the subject sees - and at least seems to be able to give a response or to reject. Even with this film it’s the same.

We use images mostly where the subject of Cole’s camera is looking into the frame because the aspect of stealing a picture is not something that I ever do, even as a photographer or as a filmmaker.

By “stealing a photograph,” you mean taking a picture without permission.

PECK: Yeah. Especially if the subject is in a very precarious condition or could be victimized. Sometimes the person doesn’t see you, but you’re in a position where the person could see you.

I rarely use long lens because it’s almost a philosophical and political attitude. It’s how you are yourself toward the “other.”

So many times, I’ve been “the other” in the room, so I know how to make sure that I don’t do the same. 

You mentioned the sequence with the porn shops and how the pace was different. Can you talk about how the editing rhythms or pace changes based on the tone of the section?

STRAUSS: I believe that I’m always the first audience, so I watch the film from the beginning - very often - every day. I learned this when I was an assistant. The film is the sum of what was before and what’s coming, so you have to watch almost 20 minutes before what you changed to have the real impression.

I like a rupture of tone. I think it’s always something that if it’s very dense with someone speaking a lot, then you have a moment of silence or a moment of music.

This rupture between more intellectual or difficult things to get, then you have emotional moments. I work a lot with this rupture - this break - of rhythm and continuity.

PECK: It’s not unlike a screenplay. When you write a screenplay, you make sure that there are breaks, there are moments, especially if you have a violent sequence or a complicated sequence or something that you know will have a big impact in the person watching.

You need to give that person time to take a breath before you go into another complicated sequence. So you have to be minding that all along, all the time.

Sometimes it’s just a sound rupture, not only a cut, but also a sound, or sometimes it’s just the background - when the background disappears. So it’s always about keeping the relationship with the audience.

STRAUSS: Keeping the line of thought and keeping the different layers also regularly coming back to them, which is the biography, the history.

PECK: You always have to manage the passage from one tone to the other. Sometimes it’s abrupt, sometimes it’s very subtle, and we use all the tools of cinema.

Raoul, I didn’t even get through a quarter of my questions! It has been so interesting talking to you. Thank you so much for your time. I know you have to go, but we’ll keep chatting with Alexandra.

PECK: Thank you very much. Take good care. 

Alexandra, let’s talk about stopping down for a little musical montage like the poodle walking montage. You have all this dialogue, you have voiceover that’s continuing. Then there’s a nice pause where you say, “We’re not going to talk. We’re just going to show you something.” Talk about making that choice and putting it in a certain place.

STRAUSS: It’s really because the pictures Ernest shot with the women walking the dog were very funny. Funny and sad, of course, but it’s all because the scene before was about the sad women that are living in this kitchen, not with their families.

They were living far from their families because of this apartheid system. It went well with Raoul’s type of humor which is a bit sarcastic. So I thought, okay, what could be the music?

What’s better than a Tchaikovsky waltz. So I tried it and because there was a series of these pictures, you could really play with it. Then you go back to serious matters after. I try this often, for example, with the kiss, which is more about love when some character is so lonely.

The idea of the kiss over the loneliness of Ernest is really interesting because you want to tell that story of him being lonely, but you have no footage of him. So how do you tell that story? 

STRAUSS: I looked at so many photographs that he made in New York, because there are a lot of photos that are the same. He photograph a lot of women on the street. He photographed a lot of couples. There are some themes that comes back often. So from that, we can imagine what interested him at that time, or how he tried to understand the country that he was so different.

We made a sequence when we compare some photography from South Africa with American pictures, but it’s the same topics: women with a dog or couples or children playing in the street, because sometime he found the same things.

He photographed the same thing that we had from South Africa, and sometimes it’s very different. Policemen in South Africa, policemen in New York streets. So that was also a very interesting idea to make a sequence from.

Maybe it’s not so obvious when you watch the film, you don’t know really which ones are from South Africa and which are from the States. So it’s quite interesting because for him, it was exactly this subject. What is the difference and what is the same and why is it the same?

This was the heart of his work, so it was worth trying to make some sequences doing this: comparing or showing the differences like a wedding scene and another wedding scene playing music on the street and how it is on the street in New York.

Every scene has a very a unique topic - a goal. What I do is really try to understand why, so there is really a reason for everything, because it needs to make the story go ahead, or because it’s the feeling you want to get. 

There’s a speech given by Oliver Tambo, and I know from watching the footage that you had other B-roll to cover, and you chose to put a jump cut in his speech. Do you remember doing that and why you might have had a jump cut?

STRAUSS: I think it was in the archival footage

Built into the archive. 

STRAUSS: Yes. Archives are really difficult too, because they’re often images that were already edited for news in the 60s. It’s not often that you get the raw footage. I don’t do jump cuts with no reason. No. It was like this. 

Like you said, everything should be intentional in the work that you do. 

STRAUSS: Yes. I think we have to make choice all the time. Editing is about choice all the time. I always say that editing is about what you didn’t put in a film, because it’s mostly what you do: You discard things, ideas or images - and you have to really.

When you have the skeleton, you have to put some flesh on it, but not too much. The skeleton must be very simple and just obvious for everyone to get in and forget that there is even editing. 

You had so many photographs to deal with. How did you organize that so that you could find them? 

STRAUSS: They were organized by topics, by country first, and then by topics. My assistant, Marie Pascaud did a lot of work. Sometimes it was a picture with two characters. I had a lot of bins with a lot of topics.

Also for archive topics, like all the archives we got from the UN or from people that were close friends. It’s really the most important. It’s a nightmare when you are looking for things and can’t find them. Organization from the very first day is important.

I have a lot of bin and I think the organization helps you to - when you are looking for something specific - you remember you saw it two months ago and you can find it.

That’s very important to know what kind of organization you want for that specific film, because every film is different, so you need to organize differently.

There’s a great montage of street signs. Can you talk just about building that rhythm, deciding that at that point in the movie, it needed some energy or something?

STRAUSS: There was this section in the script about the signs. Cole wrote that life in South Africa was punctuated by these signs which were in the public spaces everywhere. He made many photographs about this:

NO ENTRY or ONLY WHITE or all this. Ot was a series of photos, so it was interesting to make a scene out of it. That’s something that everybody knows from apartheid: those signs. So I chose a piece of music and tried to make something out of it.

Then I worked with a graphic designer and he decided to put the signs in red. It was just something very playful to make. 

So your choice of the music dictated the rhythm or did you know that you wanted a certain rhythm and that’s why you chose the music? 

STRAUSS: I looked for a few pieces of music. I tried things and then from the music I chose I built how the images come or move. 

Alexandra, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It was so nice speaking with you today. 

STRAUSS: Thank you. It was nice to talk with you.