The Colombia-born photographer Juan Orrantia has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past 12 years. His practice and career as a photographer have gone through many iterations. He was fully aware of South Africa’s history of documentary photography and complicated history with apartheid before relocating there. However, he never could have expected the uncertainty and self-doubt that would grip his practice after arriving, and lead him to not take pictures. Traveling to central and southern Mozambique offered him an opportunity to further develop his photographic interests in the affective qualities of landscapes. It would take him several years before he published the handmade diary-like photobook titled There was heat that smelled of bread and dead fish, an exploration of sites of anti-colonial struggle and civil war in Mozambique, and the varied ways in which inhabitants of these landscapes continually live within these histories of war and displacement.

While completing this project, Orrantia taught at the Wits School of Arts and pursed an MFA in Photography at the Hartford Art School. Since then, he has dedicated himself full-time to photography and distanced himself in a formal and conceptual sense from his doctoral training as a visual anthropologist. Like Stains of Red Dirt, the title of his latest photobook project and recipient of 2019 Fiebre Dummy Award, takes its name from the color of dirt in South Africa and is a metaphor for how the place of South Africa has literally stained him and his photographic practice. In the featured body of work, Orrantia photographs life from inside his family’s Johannesburg apartment, positioning intimate scenes of cohabitation at the center of questions about what it means to see history photographically and in color. Africa Is a Country contributor Drew Thompson spoke with Orrantia regarding his longstanding interest in making photobooks, and what it means to think about photography in a place like South Africa.