Team

Director: John Fleetwood
johnf@phototool.co.za

John Fleetwood (b. 1970, Johannesburg) is a photography curator and educator. He is Director of Photo:, a platform supporting socially engaged photography and photographic education in Johannesburg, and Co-Head of BA Photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK).

From 2002 to 2015, Fleetwood was Director of the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, a school, gallery and project space with a particular commitment to photography and visual literacy in South Africa and across the African continent. Through Photo:, he continues to develop and support educational and curatorial initiatives and networks, and convenes the Centres of Learning for Photography in Africa (CLPA).

Fleetwood's recent curatorial, research and public projects explore questions of photographic representation, education, ethics and the conditions through which images are produced, circulated and encountered. In 2026, he delivered the keynote “Additions and Omissions” for the epilogue of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other. Recent projects also include the Future Memories Symposium at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2025).

His curatorial projects include Concurrent (Aarhus, 2021); Five Photographers: A Tribute to David Goldblatt(Johannesburg, Maputo, Durban, Bamako and other locations, 2018–19); Of Traps and Tropes (Kerkennah, Tunisia, 2018); A Return to Elsewhere (Johannesburg and Brighton Photo Biennial, 2014); and Transition (Johannesburg and Arles, 2012–13). In 2017, he was guest editor of Aperture's Platform Africa issue.

Fleetwood is active internationally as an advisor and juror. He chaired the jury of the Hasselblad Award in 2024 and 2025 and the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2024 and 2025. He serves as Chair of the International Advisory Committee of the World Press Photo Foundation, Amsterdam since 2024.

Across these activities, Fleetwood's work is concerned with photographic education, ethics and knowledge production, and with the contexts in which photography is produced, taught, contextualised and circulated. His work seeks to build connections between photographic practices, institutions and centres of learning across different geographical and social contexts.

Coordinator: Vacant