Soft Walls seeks to deal with convivial relationships between migrated African nationals and South Africans; revealing the subtle ways in which individuals make sense of their experiences; forming relationships and bonds that can challenge dominant perceptions and prejudices and celebrate difference. Sydelle Willow Smith’s photography narrative deals with the tensions between certainty & uncertainty and conviction & distance. Soft Walls is a contemplative and tentative response to Smith’s interactions with and understanding of her subjects that layers the city, the private, and public, framed by questions of belonging and assimilation. Sydelle Willow Smith is the 2013 Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship recipient. Smith was mentored by Dave Southwood.

Sydelle Willow Smith is an award winning photographer & video director working across Africa focusing on memory, migration and identity. Based in Cape Town, born in Johannesburg her studies included time at The Market Photo Workshop, an Honours Degree in Visual Anthropology at The University of Cape Town, and a Masters of Social Science in African Studies from The University of Oxford (St Anthony's). As a visual storyteller, Smith was the first recipient of the Gisele Wulfsohn Mentorship Award for her work on migration; she also held the Africa Center Residency Award; focusing on African migration to Spain. As a graduate of the Market Photo Workshop she has exhibited in Rotterdam, Maputo, Johannesburg, and Lagos Photo Festival in various group shows. She was nominated for a Magnum Foundation grant in 2017, and is a member of Women Photograph and was in their first cohort of mentees in 2018, and nominated for World Press Joop Masterclass in 2019. For the past five years has been working on a personal project; focusing on white South Africans conceptions of belonging in relation to settler colonial histories entitled Un/Settled that was recently exhibited at Photoville in the Emerge Cube section curated by James Estrin and David Gonzales after it was featured on Lens Blog in the NY times. The project was previously shortlisted for the Paul Taylor/Dorothee Lange prize at Duke University and has just been selected to be showcased as part of the Infecting the City Public Arts Festival in Cape Town in 2019. One of the most exciting features of her work is the extent to which it is accessible to public audiences experimenting with modes of public participation. It is within the context of public participation that she shines, and where she has drawn together her interests in media, anthropology, and socio-political interventions. Smith is a partner in the award winning media agency Makhulu focusing on advocacy content and co-founded the solar powered mobile cinema non profit network Sunshine Cinema, in 2017 with her husband Rowan Pybus. They host off the grid impact screenings serving as a platform for community engagement in South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. Through their Ambassador Network - that works with youth activists to host their own screenings on mini solar cinema kits (The Sunbox) they have held impact screenings and hosted discussions in shipping containers, classrooms, churches, parking lots and community halls across Southern Africa. Alongside screenings, Sunshine Cinema focuses on media training, and developing public engagement interventions using Virtual Reality and has been working on a public health HIV awareness project with Google, UNAIDS and the Gates Foundation for the last 18 months.

The Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship in Photography has been developed to provide an emerging photographer the infrastructural support to develop a body of work. The mentorship has been created by the family and friends of the late Gisèle Wulfsohn to honour her memory and her work; and is seen as an opportunity to continue her approach and interests in photography. Wulfsohn dedicated her life and photography to awareness, openness and respect; she worked on issues of democracy, HIV/AIDS and positive sexual identities, social inclusion and gender issues, and maintained a commitment to education and social change. The mentorship is aimed at developing emerging voices that are committed to similar issues.