There are photographers who take pictures and photographers who take hostages. Alon Skuy, for the better part of a decade at the Sunday Times, specialised in the latter. His images pinned you to the page: uncompromising, tender, brutal, hopeful — sometimes all at once. Skuy had that unnerving ability to stand in front of calamity, tragedy, jubilation or Tuesday-afternoon mundanity and make it impossible to look away.
In the newsroom, his name became shorthand for a certain calibre of truth-telling. “Is Alon on it?” editors often asked, meaning: will we get the shot that tells the story — the story behind the story — the one nobody else saw? He was there for the country’s unvarnished moments: Marikana, xenophobic violence, political theatre, Joburg’s night-time souls under bridges and neon. His work had the clarity of something washed in harsh light and hung out to dry.
And then, as South Africans often do when the weather of history becomes too humid, he moved. He relocated to Miami — the pastel fever dream of America. A place where the humidity isn’t political metaphor but actual sweat. A city that looks airbrushed at noon, then drunk and disorderly by 3pm.
When Skuy arrived, Miami thought it was getting another new arrival on its shores armed with ambition and a camera. What it got instead was a chronicler with a doctorate in human contradiction.
He turned his lens on the weird and the wonderful, which in Miami is usually the same thing: aged ladies smoking in doorways on a break from roller blading; a kid dressed up as Pennywise, the clown from It talking to a woman with a balloon head; a man in a chicken suit with cock on his shoulder. He captured the city’s neon-lit insomnia, its casual surrealism, its people who look as if they’ve stepped out of a music video or a hallucination.
And then, he’s been on assignment photographing Donald Trump. Not the cartoon, not the meme, but the man — or whatever geological formation Trump most resembles in person.
Skuy was asked to follow the president around, catching those micro-expressions that slip between bluster and boredom. His portraits of Trump do that rare thing: they’re not flattering, nor cruel, but honest. You look at them and feel the odd sensation of seeing a familiar face for the first time.
Skuy has always had this talent: he makes photographs not of what things look like, but of what they mean. Miami, with all its sun-struck absurdity, seems to have fertilised that instinct. His work there is vibrant, tender, hilarious and — inspirationally — award-winningly good.
Wherever he points his lens, the world reveals its strange, beautiful, unbeautiful truth. And Skuy, as always, clicks at exactly the right millisecond.
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