Snap Shot: Portrait of an artist

At the opening of her retrospective exhibition at Wits Art Museum last week, Rory Bester, Head of the History of Art department at Wits University, introduced Jodi Bieber as "the girl about town right now".

Bieber has three exhibitions running in Johannesburg concurrently: her work features in The Rise and Fall of Apartheid exhibition at Museum Africa alongside the photographs of Alf Khumalo, David Goldblatt and Peter Magubane; she has a solo exhibition, Quiet, at the Goodman Gallery; and her mid-career retrospective, Between Darkness and Light, runs at Wits Art Museum (WAM) until July.

"The thing about Jodi," said Bester, "is her desire to ask the most important questions."

Bieber won the World Press Photo of the Year 2010 award for her iconic portrait of Bibi Aisha, a disfigured girl. Juror Aidan Sullivan said: ''This photo makes people ask 'What on earth?', 'What's going on?', 'What has happened?' For me, this was the picture that asked the most important questions."

"Photography is my way of having a voice," said Bieber. "But I believe strongly in the aesthetic of the photograph - each must work, not only as a story, but as an artwork too."

Quiet is a portrait series of men in South Africa, in their homes, in their underwear. It "addresses the performance of masculinity through a candid and intimate exploration of the fluidity of male identity".

Bieber said stripping men down to their underwear makes them more vulnerable than if they were nude.

''It's such a private space - one that women are used to having invaded. We are used to images of men in the media that suggest things like power, war and politics. The images strip the identity of the subjects to the core."

The works include captions in the subjects' own words. Bieber said the men struggled to define themselves without recourse to their fully dressed appearance.

Bieber credits US educator and filmmaker Jackson Katz for "saying what I'm thinking". He said the media helps to "construct violent masculinity as a cultural norm".

Bieber explained: "It is of interest to men and to society in general that the normality of violent masculinity be challenged to create space for men to see themselves in other ways."

The WAM exhibition, Between Darkness and Light, showed last year in Berlin, Germany.

The show spans work from 1994 - "a period that saw so much jubilation, but also the death of so many colleagues. It was a crazy, traumatic time", said Bieber.

It features work from the series Between Dogs & Wolves - Growing up with South Africa - a result of 10 years of photographing those living on the ragged outskirts of derelict communities in Johannesburg and the Northern Cape; Women who Murdered their Husbands - women doing jail time, in some cases for acting in self-defence; "I" Shoreditch - some of the characters who live in the east of London; Real Beauty - women looking comfortable in their ordinary bodies; Going Home - Illegality and Repatriation South Africa/Mozambique - a series that won the EU prize for documentary photography on the period after devastating floods in Mozambique; and Soweto - a celebration and portrait of Soweto today.

"These works as a whole get to the deeper core of the individual - everyone has elements of dark and light, a dark and a light side. It is also about shifting stereotypes, revealing worlds that we think we know, but have misconceptions and judgments about," Bieber said.

Quiet is on at the Goodman Gallery until April 26, www.goodman-gallery.com

Between Darkness and Light is on at WAM until July 20, www.wits.ac.za/wam