Photojournalist · South Africa
Greg Marinovich
Greg Marinovich (born 1962) is a South African photojournalist, filmmaker and writer. A member of the Bang-Bang Club, he won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for pictures of a killing in Soweto, was badly wounded in the firefight in which Ken Oosterbroek died, and later co-wrote the book that told the group's story. In 2012 his reporting helped reveal what happened at the Marikana massacre.
Updated 3 min read
The township war
Greg Marinovich began photographing the violence in South Africa's townships at the end of the 1980s. From 1990, as fighting between supporters of the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party spread across the townships around Johannesburg, he worked there almost daily with Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and João Silva.
The Pulitzer Prize
In 1990, at the Nancefield hostel in Soweto, after a battle between ANC and Inkatha supporters, Marinovich photographed a crowd of ANC supporters attacking and killing a man they accused of being an Inkatha spy. He sold the pictures to the Sunday Times and to the Associated Press, which began to use him as a freelancer, and the sequence won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991. After it he worked regularly for the Associated Press, and also for Newsweek, Time and The New York Times, according to South African History Online. Marinovich has written and spoken openly about how the photographs troubled him: whether his presence changed what happened, and what it means to make a career out of another person's death. In a first-person account for Al Jazeera in 2015 he called that afternoon one of the most disturbing moments of his life up to that point.
Thokoza
On 18 April 1994, in the township of Thokoza, Marinovich was shot and badly wounded in the same burst of fire that killed Oosterbroek. He has been shot and wounded four times covering conflicts in South Africa and Afghanistan; NPR reports that João Silva was at his side each time and helped him to safety. From April 1996 to August 1997 he was the Associated Press's chief photographer covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Bang-Bang Club
With Silva, Marinovich wrote The Bang-Bang Club (2000), an account of the four photographers' years in the townships, of Carter's Sudan photograph and of the deaths of Oosterbroek and Carter in 1994. Its full title is The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, and it was adapted as a film in 2010, with Ryan Phillippe playing Marinovich. Read our guide to the Bang-Bang Club.
Marikana
In August 2012 police shot dead 34 striking miners at Marikana, a platinum mine in North West province. Working as a journalist for the Daily Maverick, where he was an associate editor, Marinovich returned to the site, studied the evidence and reported that many of the miners had been killed away from the cameras, at a rocky outcrop known as Small Koppie. He expanded the work into the book Murder at Small Koppie (2016), which draws on his own investigation, eyewitness accounts and the findings of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, and which won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction in 2017. The Marikana Commission of Inquiry, which reported in June 2015, described the killings at two scenes, 17 miners at each, found that police should have stopped the operation after the first, and ruled out self-defence for four of the deaths.
After the camera
Marinovich went on to combine photography with film, writing and teaching, and he is chief content officer of The Stand, a multi-platform photo agency. He teaches at Boston University and has written for Nieman Reports, the Harvard journalism publication.
Where to see the work
The Constitutional Court Art Collection in Johannesburg lists Marinovich among its artists, and the University of Cape Town's Ibali digital collections include a Greg Marinovich Photographic Collection. Check each site for what is online and what can be consulted in person.
See also
African photography and our list of South African photographers.
