We are proud to present the Cape Town launch of Yasser Booley's photobook South Africa at Liberty, alongside an exhibition of photos from the series. The book is the last in a series on Sub Saharan African photographers published by Africalia. The exhibition is curated by Joan Legalamitlwa and will open on Wednesday 1st March and run until 26th March 2017. ARTIST STATEMENT: South Africa at Liberty is a selection of work from my first photography book that goes by the same title. The book is final in a series of photography books featuring the work of sub Saharan African photographers published by Africalia and Stichting Kunstboek in Belgium. It is a cross section of 22 years of photographing people and the various environments I have found myself in, with a view to recording the way I look at my world. The duration happens to coincide with the time period from just before the abolishing of apartheid (when I was 17 years old and I received my first camera from my father) to the end of the first 2 decades of Democratic South Africa. Entering the zone of public space with my work, I find that ‘my world’ is looking back in the form of the questions I need to answer for myself regarding the historiography of my approach to record my existence as much as confirming the legacy and presence of those whose paths I have crossed. How has my identity been shaped by being Muslim, growing up in the Bo Kaap under the shadow of Table Mountain, during Apartheid and then being old enough to have voted in the first democratic elections ? Why everyone counts is because like me, we are the centres of our ‘experiencing’ the universe and in photographing the overwhelming variety of this ‘experiencing’ in the places and people I have encountered, I slowly tease out the notions, values, beliefs from a constant flux of impressions I contend with daily. I believe that this distillation has resonance across isms and schisms and beckon to a common humanity. I want my work to act as the signage that will eventually arrive at this point of departure.