Weird, wild and wonderful shots of everyday Cape Town

The Travel Diary — In his ongoing photography project, Hometown Blues, Duran Levinson fuses portraiture and street shots to capture the day-to-day oddities of his hometown.

Cape Town is a beautiful city right on the Southern tip of Africa – a melting pot of deeply rooted traditions and cultures. It is an old city transitioning into the future, slowly. It also has a small population that literally has too much talent for its own good.

South Africa can have a reputation as a dangerous place with crazy people – and although there is crime, and all the other factors that come with a completely broken political system – people are super friendly and are happy to help you. You just need to have your wits about you, and not go exploring specific areas on your own, or without a local guide.

Hometown blues is a collection of photographs focused on Cape Town – the place in which I grew up and still call home. They were taken over the past three years, exclusively on 35mm film, in various parts of the province.

The project is an ongoing series to show the absurdities of everyday life in South Africa. Without putting too much thought into it and just capturing these moments, I hope to give a small glimpse into the realities and struggles that people face here.

I would call this project more of a street photography experiment mixed with basic portraiture. I love to capture the vibrancy of my hometown, and I’m always looking for interesting ways to portray places and faces I see often. Sometimes it can be very difficult to connect to a place you have grown up in, but every time I leave the region for work or holidays, I come back to feel revitalised.

A camera is a tool I use to tell stories – I like to give the viewer an image that they can interpret for themselves. I like to have fun with street photography and show the quirky and not-so-seen images of cities, again mainly in South-Africa. I think having the advantage of being an outsider in my own country and seeing these areas helps me to capture it in an honest or raw perspective.