John Hodgkiss (1966-2012): art photographer who fatally gave it his all

IT IS hard for me to tell you what John Hodgkiss was like, because I was in love with him for 27 years. We loved each other, although it meant different things to each of us.

IT IS hard for me to tell you what John Hodgkiss was like, because I was in love with him for 27 years. We loved each other, although it meant different things to each of us.

I never stopped learning from John. Even recently, he had been revealing to me my uselessness in trying to make what I thought were the right decisions for someone - regarding him.

On the second day of conscription into the South African Defence Force in 1985, several thousand people were lined up on the parade ground at Voortrekkerhoogte. I was 22 years old. Officials were calling names for different destinations, all terrible.

Suddenly, one boy broke ranks, screaming from the bottom of his stomach as he ran. He was caught by military police, who took him away.

A week later, a similar scream, in fact, the same primal scream, but from the pit of my own stomach, carried me out of basic training and into 1 Military Hospital's psychiatric wing.

A year later, I met Hodgkiss and discovered that he was the boy who had screamed on the parade ground. That is how we first recognised each other - primally screaming. As for the rest, for art, we found it together, John and I. My earliest works were co-made with him, rather than photographed by him.

The safest space in art I knew was in John's small, makeshift studio, where, with a roll of white paper and infinite patience and ingenuity, we created magical images. It was part of, and the antithesis of, the public-intervention work we did together in the late 1990s, which ranged from the unquiet to the exploding.

John walked side by side with me into the face of South African public humiliation and critical scorn, and with his camera he recorded the action as neutrally as possible, yet at the same time it was thoroughly signed by him.

After the army, John went to Rhodes University to do fine art and became the photographer we knew. But inside the photographer was always the minimally producing, thoroughly genius artist, a magnificent talent, mostly suppressed.

In the last years, I saw John get more and more lost as he recorded artworks, instead of making them - and at a cruelly punishing rate.

John let himself be thoroughly used by the art community, and he abused himself in providing service, running the machine at the wrong pace, working Da Vinci hours, sitting up impossibly late at the computer screen for decades.

I saw it happen. I contributed. At the same time as John loved his work, he let its ever-increasing load mount until, combined with drink, it crushed him. John and I collaborated for 25 years and we always maintained a sense of naughty schoolboys or fellow mad professors. John filmed and photographed from my first work in the '80s to my most recent work in 2011, The Cradle of Humankind, even though he was thoroughly unwell.

It was only because of the intense relationship that always existed between John and [my former nanny] Nomsa Dhlamini for nearly four decades that we got the material we did for this work. Nomsa had utter trust in John - a "pure gentleman", she always called him. The last time we saw John this year, a 91-year-old and almost blind Nomsa said: "Who's that man with the horrible face? That's not John." It was the vodka.

I have a tender memory of John from when he was 19 and I was 23, and we climbed Table Mountain through Kirstenbosch. At some point, on a ledge, John reached into a crevice with his hand. I asked: "What are you taking out?" John said: "I'm putting something in." That was John, giving rather than taking.

There have to be publications of John's work.

Even if it is too late, it is time to give something back - a recognition of him as his own artist, not a name made on the backs of others.

Even in the downhill slide we all watched, petrified, John clasped at fragments of love, a work in a collection, a person, a fragment of things being momentarily okay. I have never felt for one minute about someone the way I have felt about John since the moment I met him. In this time of losing John Hodgkiss, I feel as if the only other witness to who I am will never be present again.

Born on September 25 1966 in Johannesburg, he studied under the renowned photographer Obie Oberholzer at Rhodes University. He died of natural causes in his sleep on March 15 and was found in his Melville, Johannesburg, home by a friend.

He is survived by his parents and three sisters.