Resistance and resilience

The Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, supported by Nikon, honours documentary photography that highlights solutions as well as struggles. This year's winner, South African photographer Jodi Windvogel, turns her lens on Cape Town's Cissie Gool House, capturing resilience and resistance in the face of a housing crisis.

- Peter Dench

The Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award has become one of the most significant prizes for women in documentary photography, not only for the financial support it provides but for the ethos it represents. Established in honour of the late Marilyn Stafford (1925-2023), the award champions long-form, socially engaged projects that spotlight solutions as much as struggles.

Founded and facilitated by FotoDocument and generously supported by Nikon, the award carries a £3,000 grant to help a professional woman photographer complete a compelling documentary photo essay. Nikon’s ongoing backing has been central to ensuring the award continues to highlight urgent issues and amplify under-reported voices.

This year’s winner, South African photographer and filmmaker Jodi Windvogel, embodies that vision with her deeply embedded photo essay Life Under Occupation: Inside Cissie Gool House & Cape Town's Housing Crisis.

Windvogel’s project focuses on the ‘occupied’ Cissie Gool House, a former hospital in Cape Town that since 2017 has been home to more than 1,500 people resisting displacement. What could easily be presented as a story of protest alone is reframed as something more nuanced: a living, breathing act of urban resistance where working-class families have built a self-organised community in the face of South Africa’s deepening housing crisis.

'Before I ever raised a camera, I stood alongside the residents in their fight for housing justice,' Windvogel says. 'I attended protests, listened at meetings, and learned about their vision for a more equitable city. Picking up my camera felt like a natural extension of my solidarity - another way to stand with them and share their story with the world.'

Solidarity

What makes Life Under Occupation compelling is not only its subject but the way Windvogel approaches it.