Tracey Derrick

Award winning photographer Tracey Derrick has spent her career probing and portraying specific South African social issues. She has exhibited extensively locally and internationally.


She has continually taught and conducted photography workshops, sometimes teaching her subjects to take their own photographs and share their stories with the larger society.

Many of her projects have been published as educational texts to reach school and community groups.


See her website for more information: http://www.traceyderrick.co.za

One in nine: My Camera, My Mirror

One in nine women will contract breast cancer in South Africa. I was diagnosed in May 2008 and this project was made in response to my illness, its treatment and my survival. By becoming the active subject of my own investigation, it helped me to understand my own condition and integrate it into my life.

As a documentary photographer, I have always positioned myself relating to and interacting with my subjects. I document other small communities. Suddenly, through my illness I became a member of a marginal group. My way of coping with this was to analyse my own story through images, especially with my daughters.

I used different cameras and various techniques, both old and new –holding the camera gave me power and enabled me to look objectively at what I was going through, it was a process that enabled me to move forward and finally close a chapter.