Can you introduce yourself for me?
My name is Neo Baepi. I am 28 years old - I don’t look it [smiles warmly]. I have quite a long geographical history in South Africa. I was born in a small town called Klerksdorp in the North West and I grew up in a town about the same size 45 minutes away called Potchefstroom until I was about 6, and then I moved to Johannesburg with my dad and we lived in Yeoville which is in the CBD and you don’t want to live there now. And I lived in places like Soweto, PE, Cape Town, Texas, and grew up with most of my formative life in Johannesburg. I identify myself probably 6 different times a day or an hour, but I would say that I’m a gender non conforming boy, and I like girls... who also bend genders. I’m a photographer, I really like taking photographs, and I feel a lot more human when I have a camera in my hand cause things are so bleak, things are so sad, but when I get to take photos of people who want me to take photos of them, I feel like we can work on this mess of a world we’ve got.
Why photography?
So, the story goes that when I was growing up I had a family friend, an uncle, who took photos his whole life, but he also drank himself to a stupor every night, so he died quite young. And the way he funded his drinking habit was with taking photos of weddings and graduations and birthday parties in the hood. And I would go with him and I really liked the way the equipment looked. I’m quite obsessed with guns and ammunition and cameras look a lot like guns, shooting and all of that. And so after he died, people still needed photos, so he taught me and passed the skill down to me and I was about 9 or 10 when I took over from him, and so I also taught myself. But I went to school, I studied photojournalism, which I hated. I kind of hate that I’m a trained journalist cause it makes me so pessimistic of the work, you know? But yeah, the ability to tell stories and not just make money is important to me. My mentor [in varsity] was quite mean, he was a mean man, but was incredibly nice to me, took me under his wing and all that, but he actually was a mean drunk who wanted to make money; I don’t think he cared about taking photos. And I said, “Fuck this, there’s something beautiful about taking photos”. The act of making a portrait - there’s something really fulfilling about it. It's not just about what the photo looks like, it's the process.
What does becoming mean to you?
So, up until very recently, I identified as a lesbian, but even when I did, I didn’t feel like one and I couldn’t relate to other lesbians and I really didn’t know why but I just went with it because labels, right? It's a way to move through society. And then I met my partner and what she made me realize was that I was given space by her and her thinking and our relationship to explore my gender and my sexuality and my sexual orientation. The things that have stayed consistent are my sexuality and my sexual orientation, but my gender is always transforming. So, becoming to me is that transformation. It's about accepting and embracing that I’m never going to be one thing, or a set of things, and I shouldn’t fixate on those things. So, the reason I like talking about my queerness is because I sometimes forget I’m queer - it’s not something I fixate on, it’s not a thing that makes me who I am. And I realize its getting trendier and it’s getting cuter to be gay, and I appreciate that, but I also interrogate that. I’m very conscious of gay for play ass niggas, because I’ve always been this way. And growing up, I was never forced to accept it as my entire destiny; I am so many things before and after I’m gay. So, becoming means constantly making the world adaptable to you as opposed to the other way around. I am tired of bending and crouching for this ugly planet. I’m going to expand it so I can walk tall. So yeah, that’s what becoming looks like to me, it’s making the world bigger so I can breathe and be. I’m tired of being small, and becoming is the process, it’s a very active process of not being small.
How has photography helped you be who you are?
I’m really good at it, and I really like being good at stuff. I’ve had a lot of skills in my life that I’ve long put away. I used to be an athlete, now I smoke like 20 cigarettes a day. I swam midmar mile, I did track, I did provincial soccer, football, I was gonna swim the English Channel at some point, but I gave up on that dream, so yah I was a pretty serious athlete, and then I wasn’t anymore because it wasn’t me. I was just good at it. So, photography has helped me in becoming because of the cheesy storytelling, and documenting, and archiving and all of that, and more than anything I’m good at it, and I enjoy being good at it, superficial as it may sound. And I’m also really in awe of how democratized the media has become. So, there’s a Time Magazine 100 issue in which there are 100 most influential photos of all time. So, it’s spread out across four issues, 25 photos each, and one of those photos is the first cell phone camera photo of a baby just being born. That never happened before; photography was mostly inaccessible, primarily for rich people, and it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t instantaneous. The cell phone crushed all of that. Fast forward to a couple of years later where social media and Instagram come into play where everyone can now be a photographer. Fast forward to digital photography where you don’t have to send your negatives to someone anymore unless you wanna be a hipster - but you don’t have to get your negatives developed by a professional anymore. You can process them yourself with your own camera, there's an automatic setting. And that’s not because Nikon or Canon want you to be able to be a photographer, they just want to sell cameras. So, I just like how democratized the media has become.
I meet a lot of people in my job - older people, younger people, straight people, racist people, homophobic people, people who aren’t those things - and what I’ve learned being a photographer is that it’s very important to have dialogues with people you don’t agree with, otherwise it’s just echo chambers and circle jerks. That was cool in 2014 when we were all giving each other language on how to face issues; now we’ve got the language and now we need to face things head on. We realize racism is wrong, what are we going to do about it? Talk to a racist, find out why they’re racist, because we don’t know everything just because we’re Black, and I don’t know everything about being good just because I’m gay - there are bad gay people out there! So, I suppose having a camera is like being the Humans of New York guy in which there is a buffer between me and this person, which is this image we can make if we just work on ourselves for just a little bit. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it's made me a lot more confident. And it's not like I wasn’t, but I have anxieties, I have my own worries, but they seem to suspend when I have the potential to make a good photo. I stop worrying about it, and I’m grateful for that. And there’s also time when I never take photos for months when I’m not working or not shooting, and that’s not because I don’t want to or because I can't but because the drive and the motivation to shoot isn’t there. I was so fixated on inspiration… Ugh… And sometimes I’m not shooting and that’s fine because I’m not just a photographer. I want to learn how to DJ, I’m learning how to be DJ, actively.
Why is it important to choose to be who you are, to choose to work on the things that make you feel human?
I’ve never been anything other than this, even at my worst. My worst memories are high school, I hated high school because teenagers are very vicious and it's like a herd mentality, it’s very group thinking. And if you steer from the group, you’re ostracized, a pariah, right? And now when you’re an individual, you are praised for that shit - imagine that. I now look at all my schoolmates and they’re all literally stepford wives, like married with children at 28. It's not a condemnation, but I’m so grateful for going out of my way to be different.
I matriculated in PE [Port Elizabeth]. If you know anything about PE, it’s the armpit of South Africa, it’s 17 years behind the rest of the country, and my schoolmates have not left PE. Just like people have not left Ohio. I don’t get that. I have very good parents; me and my dad have a contentious history but we are very good friends now, we’re really really strongly bonded now. My mom and my dad and my step mother have never discouraged me from choosing myself, and choosing myself meant letting me wear what I want to wear, eat what I want to eat, watch the TV I want to watch, read the books I want to, listen to the music I want to. They’d always challenge me on it, they’d ask, “Do your pants have to sag that low?” [laughs]. But it was never, “Stop wearing pants”. And as I grow up, it's an even more open conversation - I’m working on coming out to them as trans or non binary or both, I don’t know yet, and it’s frightening because you know they’ve given me all this space to be this person, but how much can they take? And why am I thinking of myself like an event that happens to people, how much of me can you take? I’m your kid you know? But they’ve shown me they’re willing to work on it, so they’re willing to understand it. I mean my dad said to me years ago, “Your grandmother would readily embrace a rapist in the family before she accepts your gayness”, which was him basically saying “Pick yourself dude, we’re not going to be here forever”. So yeah, I’m always trying to get the people that I love to be mindful and thoughtful ‘cause that shit is sexy, it will get you laid, I promise you. Because once you’ve become empathetic, you don’t have to absorb things, but you become a blank canvas for other people all the time. Not like a therapist or anything, but you understand why people have problems, and you understand that your own problems matter, that your own issues are valid. Which is why I can tell when someone isn’t empathetic, I can just tell by the way that they think about me and the way they move in the world.
Why is it important to choose yourself?
It’s important to pick yourself, not in the cheesy way, like “choose yourself” as a sticker on a wall in white woman’s home, but picking yourself is important particularly as a queer person, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Most recycling has to happen more rigorously; when you throw away cardboard, you have to clean it, you have to separate it from colours, you know what I mean? When you throw away your milk carton you have to make sure its clean or you might as well not recycle - bad recycling is just as bad as pollution. So, if I pick myself at the expense of others then you’re not really choosing yourself, but if you pick yourself empathetically, then it’s community based and you do it for everybody else, including yourself. It's very rewarding to do it that way. There’s no point in picking yourself selfishly. No, there's nothing wrong with being selfish, but there's no point in picking yourself at the expense of other people which is what racism is, which is what whiteness is. But choosing yourself mindfully and empathetically is different.
What were pivotal moments of becoming?
When I was younger, I convinced myself that I had a rare disease where I grew female, femme parts. That's not a mistake, that’s very intelligent for like a 10 year old to imagine. So, that was really pivotal, that’s when I realized I’m beyond just gay, there’s something and it’s not a dysphoric thing - I’ve never been dysphoric, I just accepted it as just a difference which is why it’s probably easy for me to empathetically pick myself. I didn’t say I was in the wrong body, I was like, “I’m in this body and we have to deal with it”.
Another pivotal moment was the death of my uncle. I was 12 when he died and he committed suicide and he was really depressed. I was 12 so I didn’t know, and you know the family barely talks about it, but I lost my best friend, he was 23 years old. And that's when I discovered mental illness as something that's not really explored for Black people, and I might have to say we are the most depressed people out here and we don’t really confront that.
And I think the third pivotal moment was when I slept with a woman for the first time… [laughs]. Yeah, I don’t think I need to say more about that [laughs once more].
All of those things I suppose in some way consciously, unconsciously, subconsciously, have made me who I am and who I’m trying to be. If someone had to ask me if I’m a good person, I could say absolutely, without a fucking doubt. I am a very good person. But that's not the same as asking “Do you like Neo?”. You don’t have to like me, but you can’t challenge my character. I know I’m a good person. And it's very gratifying to know that.