At the Iyatsiba Lab in Woodstock, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities has opened its doors to #shoot4purpose, an organisation that walks alongside women who have lived through hardship. Its photography programme has helped close to 200 women pick up a camera and begin to see themselves differently, and its partnership with the University of the Western Cape (UWC) gives that work a home and a public stage: an annual exhibition at the university's Centre for Humanities Research (CHR).

The idea is simple - #shoot4purpose runs a five-week street-photography programme for women who have experienced trauma, gender-based violence, loss, and other forms of adversity. The women come in with no photography experience, and they are guided by mentors, some of whom went through the programme themselves. There are no heavy technical lessons in the programme. Instead, women are encouraged to find beauty in small things. “We do not claim to be counsellors, and we do not claim that we teach people photography in five weeks,” said co-founder Nawawie Mathews. “We try to get them to fall in love with the camera. Once they fall in love with the camera, that is where the learning starts.”

The programme began when Nawawie Mathews and a fellow photographer took a walk after the COVID-19 lockdown and decided to use their cameras for a purpose. From the start, #shoot4purpose was about more than teaching photography. It used the camera to document life in the city and to tell stories that often go unseen. The founders had watched inequality and gender-based violence grow sharper during the pandemic in one of the most unequal cities in the world, and they wanted their work to respond to it. The first cohort of five women met on a street corner in Salt River in September 2021. Fifteen cohorts later, the programme is still free and self-funded.

A partnership built on shared values

The home of the programme is the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab. For the Centre, the partnership was an easy decision. “They were not coming to us as experts,” said Dr Maurits van Bever Donker, the Centre's director. “It was not a case of the university being an ivory tower and the community being somewhere over there. It was more like: "You are in our community, we are doing this in our community, do you want to do this with us?”
He sees the work as part of a bigger project. The apartheid regime, he explained, spent decades shaping how people saw one another and how they related to difference. The Centre believes that imagining a fairer future means retraining the senses, and that is exactly what #shoot4purpose does in practice. “It allows people to imagine themselves, their place in the community and the futures available to them differently,” he said.

For Mathews, being based at UWC carries its own meaning. The university was once dismissed as “Bush University”, pushed far from the city, and the building CHR now occupies was a primary school during apartheid and later a factory that employed many people from the Cape Flats. Working in that space feels to him like reclaiming it. “To be back in Woodstock and offering this programme to women who have experienced trauma is a luxury on top of everything else,” he said.

Lives that change in five weeks

The work comes together each year at the exhibition, held at the Centre in December or January. At the most recent show, titled ‘Between Shadows and Light,’ participants saw their names on the walls and their photographs professionally hung. Families came, ribbons were cut, and a few spoke about what the programme had meant to them.
 
The journeys behind those photographs are always remarkable. Some women arrive carrying deep loss and find it hard to get through their days. But by the end, they leave with something they did not have before. Others have bought their own equipment and now mentor newer participants. There are many such stories, and care runs through all of it. The programme is guided by an advisory council, and the team chooses its photography locations carefully, beginning in safe spaces before moving into busier parts of the city.
A different model of community engagement

For the CHR, hosting #shoot4purpose had to fit a strict rule: its building may only be used for research-based work. The team treated the organisation's work as research in its own right and then left it to run on its own terms, resisting the temptation to reshape it into a university project. Mathews hopes other universities and institutions will follow this collaboration example. “The challenge to other institutions is to roll up their sleeves,” he said. “Forget the academic talk for a moment and build consistently.” His advice is to start small and let partnerships inside real communities grow over time. He has seen what creative work can do for the women who come through the programme, and he believes the same approach could reach much further.

For Dr van Bever Donker, this is the heart of the partnership and the lesson he wants other universities to take from it. “This is a different model of community engagement,” he said. “It is not about imposing something. It is about allowing and facilitating what is already happening. In a sense, it is about getting out of the way.”