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Photographer David Bruce has been photographing Bushmen in Namibia for more than a decade. He shares thoughts on the place, the people and the passion he feels for his subject.

“My subject involves one of the last true wilderness regions of Southern Africa: the home of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, the only Bushmen still hunting and gathering on ancestral land. Archaeologists have determined through analyses of ash found below the calcrete layer that the Ju/’hoan people have been living in this region for at least 40,000 years.

It was only in 1951 that they came into contact with the western world. The Marshal family from America made the first organized research expedition and opened the floodgates. Now, the Ju/’hoansi are one of the most studied and written about indigenous peoples in the world.

The Nyae Nyae region, home to the Ju/’hoan people, is a vast track of Kalahari wilderness, which lies in north east Namibia, alongside the Botswana border. It’s an extreme landscape of exceptional beauty that few encounter. More than 2,000 elephants move freely about and it’s also home to the most free-ranging antelope herds in Namibia as well as healthy numbers of leopard, hyena, wild dogs and jackal. During the seasonal rainy season, the pans are transformed into a wetland area of international importance, providing a habitat for migratory birds, around 10,000 flaminigo and two globally threatened species, the wattled crane and slaty egret.

An approximate 10,000 square kilometers is, however, all that remains of an approximate 90,000 square kilometers that the Ju/’hoans people roamed as recently as 1950. As with all indigenous people of the world, they have been squeezed into an ever diminishing landscape.

I left England, borrowed a truck and drove out to the Western Kalahari. The reason being that I served a two-year conscription service in the South African Army training tracking dogs during the Angolan/South West African bush war before Namibia’s independence. Although I didn’t work with them, a significant number of Ju/’hoasi Bushmen took paid jobs for the first time as trackers.

This not only provided a connection, but many of the trackers had learnt Afrikaans, which I also spoke. The Ju/’hoan language and its click is notoriously difficult to learn, with only a handful of Europeans speaking it fluently. I quickly became known as Bagon/ui, which means ‘the man that hears.’ This provided endless fascination to the Bushment. At the time, I used to wear a band over my head with a hearing aid on one side and a pick up on the other. This was the crude foundation of the bone anchor hearing aids that I now have.

So I was not only provided with a subject, but with an endless fascination with the Ju/’hoan people. This gave me a new found passion for life, which I pushed to the extreme. During some years, I spent eight months of the year living with the Ju/’hoan people. My interest in photography has always been somewhat classically influenced by Irving Penn, using a mobile studio and large cameras. An unconscious observation with the subject, but looking at the resulting artwork, it is plain to see the connection and their desire to be recorded. Certainly in knowing the people, they were able to reveal themselves to me and I recognized that moment. That, I feel, is the power of the pictures.

As an artist working with a living subject, it’s impossible for me not to get involved. The Ju/’hoan people have repeatedly asked for access to education. Linguistic work from the ‘70s and ‘80s on the orthography of the Ju/’hoansi language paves the way for that education. This knowledge led to the creation of the Ju/’hoanis Development fund with a longtime friend.

Many people naively ask: if the Ju/’hoansi still hold onto a subsistent hunter and gather lifestyle, why change that? What you see here, though, is the last of that generation. There are now no indigenous cultures immune to the western world and many of my portraits are of people no longer alive today. I’ve experienced 12-hour dance sermons for people who have since died. N/oakxa Oma, the woman with her hands on her hips, was a matriarchal figure and a source of endless amusement and fascination for me. While I busy doing a portrait, she walked up to the mobile studio and sat on the edge of the canvas. When I turned to her, she wagged her finger at me. As soon as I finished my portrait, she jumped in front of the camera, I took three frames and she laughed and walked off the set. Three months later she was tragically killed by an elephant. Nothing in this life has moved me more than these people, their plight and what I have learned from them.”

Join Indagare for a special event at Sotheby’s to view David Bruce’s photographs and hear him talk about his work.