The stories behind the images

BREAKING NEWS: During a panel discussion held on 13 September 2025, it was agreed that South Africa’s photographic archives are in crisis, with little support for preserving music photography. Out of that conversation, a working group was formed, and the Cape Town Photography Festival (CTPF) committed to exploring ways to safeguard this legacy and establish a dedicated archive.

To help realise this vision, CTPF has partnered with Stephan Welz & Co. to host an online and live auction of music photography from 6 – 20 November 2025 in Cape Town. Proceeds from the auction will provide the seed funding needed to begin building a national music photography archive - an initiative dedicated to ensuring that the visual story of our sound is never lost.

Over the next month Carsten Rasch, curator of the music photography exhibition, Shooting Stars will share a few of the stories behind the images. 

HERE IS THE FIRST ONE!   

You will not be able to stay home, brother 

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out 

You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and Skip out for beer during commercials 

Because the revolution will not be televised 

These words were spoken, softly at first, but with increasing intensity by Gil Scott-Heron in his spoken-word song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The song never became a hit, surprisingly, though it certainly carried a powerful message in the days when messages in songs were taken very seriously. Much more seriously than they are today, when revolutions are indeed being televised, perhaps even created and/or negated by television. The song appeared first appeared on the live album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox in 1970, but a year later another version was re-recorded for the album, Pieces of a Man, featuring a compelling bassline by Ron Carter, some groovy beats by Bernard Purdie (the man behind the legendary Purdie Shuffle) and the call-and-response flute of Hubert Laws – more about him later. 

Scott-Heron was a staunch anti-apartheid activist whose first hit was a song called Johannesburg, a city he would not set foot in until 1998, when photographer Oscar Guiterrez shot these outstanding portraits of the man whose poems had become the soundtrack of a revolution. He had performed at Megamusic in Newtown, but unsurprisingly socialised in Yeoville. Beat poet Sinclair Beilles lived just down the road, and over two long days in September, Guiterrez joined the pair, drinking coffee, exchanging life-altering ideas and capturing a few iconic moments on film. At the time, there were perhaps two other people in Joburg who could match Scott-Heron’s revolutionary zest - Beillies, who hung out with William Burroughs, Brian Gysin and Gregory Corso and co-authored Minutes To Go, a book that radicalised literature through its cut-up method of writing. The other person was Keorapetse Kgositsile, better known as Bra Willie, the resistance poet who inspired the American group, The Last Poets, to take their name from one of his poems. They released the song When The Revolution Comes which, in turn, inspired Scott-Heron to get off the couch and write The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 

In another of those uncanny circular turns of history, the same flautist mentioned earlier, Hubert Laws, was photographed half a world and half a century away by self-taught Cape Town lensman Gregory Franz during a WOMAD concert at St George’s Cathedral in 2024. That image was shown earlier this year in the Cape Town PhotoFest’s Shooting Stars exhibition - hanging across the corridor, by pure coincidence, less than a metre and a half from Scott-Heron’s portrait. 

OSCAR GUTIERREZ is a Guatemalan-born, US-raised and -educated and Cape Town–based photographer whose black-and-white images explore the emotional and cultural depth of South African life. Deeply inspired by the work of Dorothea Lange and the documentary traditions of Life Magazine, Oscar turned to photography as a way to understand and honour human experience. Since arriving in South Africa in 1994 to document the country’s first democratic elections, he has chronicled its unfolding story — from the political to the poetic — with a camera attuned to both historic moments and intimate truths. His portraits and reportage span labour movements, national leaders, township life, and the vibrant worlds of music and the arts. 

GREGORY FRANZ is self-taught and has no formal photography training. “There was always a film point-and-shoot camera around”, he says. When he started a music blog in the early 2000s he needed his own images, so he bought himself a digital compact camera. Then realising he needed to work around low light, the need for a specialist camera arose and from there he just got drawn deeper into music photography. He covers mainly festivals and jazz venues, including the Cape Town International Jazz Festival. His main interest is live music photography: “I still consider myself just to be a music lover with a camera…”