South African photographer and filmmaker Jodi Windvogel has been introduced because the winner of the 2025 Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award for her ongoing mission Life Below Occupation: Inside Cissie Gool Home & Cape City’s Housing Disaster.
The £3,000 award (round US$4,100), supported by Nikon and facilitated by FotoDocument, acknowledges excellent documentary pictures by girls addressing urgent social or environmental points via solution-focused storytelling.
Windvogel’s mission facilities on Cissie Gool Home, a former Cape City hospital that since 2017 has been occupied by over 1,500 individuals resisting displacement. By an embedded lens, she paperwork not solely the authorized uncertainty and political rigidity surrounding the occupation but additionally the mutual care, dignity, and community-building inside its partitions. Her work treats the area each as a web site of protest and as a residing reply to an more and more pressing housing disaster.
“I really feel completely honoured to be receiving the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2025,” mentioned Windvogel. “With this award, I’ll be capable to proceed and full my work at Cissie Gool Home – whereas additionally letting the neighborhood know that their braveness, resistance, and tales are being acknowledged on a world stage.”
The annual award, named in honor of the late photographer Marilyn Stafford (1925–2023), is meant to help the completion of a cohesive, socially engaged documentary essay. As ever, the emphasis is on pictures that not solely exposes injustice but additionally proposes hope; a visible file that invitations public engagement and, ideally, social change.
This 12 months’s shortlist featured photographers from nations together with South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and the US.
The jury praised Windvogel’s mission for its emotional energy and moral readability. “The pictures are uncooked, emotional, and highly effective,” mentioned FotoDocument founder and juror Nina Emett. “Collectively they inform a inventive and compelling story of weak, dignified individuals taking energy into their very own palms.”
Andrea Bruce, Nikon Ambassador and juror, added: “The winner confirmed a connection to the individuals and matter that outweighed type or technical expertise. That is one thing harder to acquire and so appreciated.”
Windvogel’s method is a part of a rising motion in documentary pictures, one which favors collaboration over extraction and that seeks to reframe points typically portrayed via the lens of pity and distance. Her photographs don’t romanticize hardship, however neither do they flatten it into cliché. As an alternative, they provide a portrait of resistance formed by empathy, belief, and proximity.
For Neo Ntsoma, one other juror, this was key: “What stood out to me about Jodi’s entry is the way in which she captures the power and unity of the individuals at Cissie Gool Home in a really inspiring and dignified method. Her storytelling challenges dominant narratives and showcases neighborhood resilience and resourcefulness.”
As cities the world over grapple with housing inequality, Windvogel’s work stands as each witness and intervention, a mission that acknowledges its personal place inside the wrestle and makes use of the instruments of pictures to present voice to these preventing for a house.
Above: A video message from Jodi Windvogel about her award-winning mission
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