Photojournalist reflects on a storied career

Two-time World Press Photo award winner Ilvy Njiokiktjien captivated the audience at Xposure International Photography Festival (Xposure 2026) with a masterclass in narrative storytelling that revealed the dramatic and often dangerous journey behind her groundbreaking 18-year project documenting South Africa’s first post-apartheid generation.

The “Born Free – Mandela’s Generation of Hope” project is also on exhibition at the festival.

In her talk “Narrative Storytelling and Getting Your Work Seen,” the Dutch photographer offered an unflinching look at the challenges and triumphs of long-form documentary work.

Depicting the faces of bigotry

Njiokiktjien opened her session with one of the most gripping stories from her career - her documentation of the Kommandokorps, an organisation in South Africa that ran youth camps teaching biased ideologies to young Afrikaner children.

After taking photographs there, she realised she had a problem.

“Even though this is a camp, you cannot see he’s a radical,” she explained. “Because of the dead deer behind his face, you could think he’s a hunter, for instance, or leader of a Boy Scout group or whatever.”

Njiokiktjien realised she needed audio and video to convey the full horror of what was being taught. Working with journalist Elles van Gelder, she accumulated over 53 hours of video footage over nine days, and the resulting documentary won a World Press Photo award in the Contemporary Issues category.

After the story was published and the World Press Photo exhibition toured globally, the story went viral, but aside from raising awareness about racism, it also attracted new recruits to the camp.

This unexpected outcome inspired Njiokiktjien to return to South Africa and spend time with five of the families whose boys attended the camp.

“There were also parents that saw the documentary, and they were shocked. They thought they were sending their boy to a camp where he would gain leadership skills. Then he came back more biased than they could have ever imagined.”

This experience - and feedback from white South Africans who were against racism - shaped the long-term direction of her work and led to Born Free, an 18-year project documenting South Africa’s post-apartheid youth across race, class, geography, and opportunity.