Nic Bothma has spent more than three decades trying to recognise the fraction of a second in which a story reveals itself. Sometimes that moment has arrived in the middle of conflict, when fear, chaos and human vulnerability briefly align in front of his camera.
At other times, it has come at the end of an Olympic race, when years of preparation, sacrifice and expectation collapse into the instant an athlete crosses the finish line. For Bothma, these situations may look entirely different, but the instinct required to photograph them is much the same. He is looking for what he describes as the point where intensity and meaning intersect, the moment when an image can become more than a record of what happened and instead communicate something larger about the experience itself.
It is an instinct he has refined over a career spanning more than 30 years and more than 100 countries. Bothma has photographed four Summer Olympic Games, two Winter Olympics, three Wimbledon championships, the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the Surfing World Tour and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. He has worked through conflicts and crises in Liberia, Togo, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast and elsewhere, while his photographs have been shown in more than 10 exhibitions and received multiple international awards, including three Fujifilm South Africa Photographer of the Year awards.
His work is also held in the permanent collection of the University of South Africa Art Gallery. Yet despite the scale of that career, Bothma speaks about photography less as a profession he has mastered than as something he is still learning to understand. “There can never be enough to learn about photography,” he says. “It is an endless pursuit and one can always get better.”
That pursuit began during one of the most turbulent and important periods in South Africa’s modern history. Bothma was studying anthropology at the University of Cape Town during the final years of apartheid and working part time as a runner for a BBC television news crew. South Africa had become a major international story, and the years leading up to Nelson Mandela’s release were marked by political upheaval, civil unrest and violence.
While working with the BBC, Bothma carried a still camera and found himself alongside some of the most prominent photojournalists working at the time, including James Nachtwey and the Turnley brothers. Watching them work gave him an unexpected way of thinking about the subject he was studying at university. Anthropology had taught him to look at people, societies and human behaviour, but photojournalism offered a way to do that work directly, in the middle of history as it was unfolding. When he sold one of his photographs to a newspaper as a freelancer, he realised there was also a viable profession in front of him. Photojournalism, he decided, was a far more exciting form of anthropology than the academic path he had originally imagined for himself.
Those early years in South Africa did more than give Bothma his entry into journalism. They shaped the way he would work for the rest of his career. He was drawn to the difficulty of covering events in unstable environments and to the responsibility of documenting what was really happening at a time when competing versions of the country’s future were being fought over in both political and physical terms. There were places, he recalls, where the unrest amounted to outright war, but rather than being repelled by the intensity of those situations, he found purpose in trying to record them accurately. He believed journalism allowed him to contribute to the country’s transition by showing people what was taking place. “I felt part of the solution, not the problem,” he says. Working amid violence taught him to move quickly, remain accurate under pressure and become acutely aware of what was happening around him. By the time he later found himself covering wars and political crises elsewhere on the continent, the experience he had gained in South Africa had already given him much of the discipline he needed.
After beginning professionally as a staff photographer at the Cape Times, Bothma worked as a freelancer from 1997 to 2003 before joining the European Pressphoto Agency, where he eventually became Chief Photographer for Africa and Sub-Sahara Africa Bureau Chief. Over time, the locations and assignments changed dramatically, but his understanding of storytelling remained surprisingly consistent. Whether he was photographing a war, a natural disaster, a tennis championship or the Olympics, he came to see that every story still required the same fundamental structure. “Stories are all the same in that they have a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. There is a narrative arc, a movement through time and an underlying journey, and the photographer’s responsibility is to recognise that journey and find a way of documenting it authentically, logically and creatively enough to communicate its essence to someone who was not there.
For Bothma, that authenticity depends in part on resisting the temptation to impose too much of the photographer onto the story. He tries to see situations as naturally as possible and photograph what is actually in front of him, while acknowledging that complete objectivity is difficult because every journalist carries biases into their work. The professional responsibility is therefore not to pretend those biases do not exist, but to recognise them and develop the discipline to prevent them from overwhelming the truth of the situation. This is one reason he regards visual journalism as one of journalism’s most honest forms. At its best, a photograph can confront the viewer directly with a person, place or moment and communicate an emotional and factual reality that may be difficult to reproduce in words alone. The challenge is finding the image that best symbolises the larger story without distorting it.
His thinking about this has been heavily influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer Bothma describes as his greatest mentor, and particularly by Cartier-Bresson’s idea of “the decisive moment.” Bothma understands the concept as the point when visual, chronological and emotional factors align and suddenly reveal what is happening with unusual clarity. He is especially drawn to high-intensity moments because people often become most open, raw and vulnerable at the edges of human experience: at birth, in death, during conflict or in the moment of extraordinary achievement. He uses the example of the 100-metre final at the Olympics. The instant an athlete crosses the line to win gold is only a fraction of a second, but contained within it can be years of training, pressure, disappointment, sacrifice and ambition. The photographer’s work begins long before pressing the shutter. Bothma studies the situation, anticipates where the emotional and physical crescendo may occur and positions himself so that when everything finally comes together, he is there to capture it. That, he says, is the place where meaning and intensity intersect.
That search for the decisive moment becomes more complicated when the people being photographed are experiencing trauma, violence or extreme vulnerability. Photojournalists working in those environments are constantly confronted with questions about where professional responsibility ends and human responsibility begins, but Bothma does not see the two as necessarily opposed. He believes the photographer has a duty to make the image because documenting what happened is precisely why the journalist is there.
Without those photographs, events can disappear from public view and people far away may never fully understand what occurred. At the same time, he insists that journalism cannot be used as an excuse to abandon basic humanity. The familiar ethical question is whether a photographer should help an injured person or photograph them. Bothma’s response is that, in reality, the photographer can often do both. It takes 1/1000th of a second to make an image while approaching someone who is injured, he says, and the photographer can then put down the camera and help carry that person to safety.
For him, this principle extends far beyond emergencies. Respect for the people being photographed should shape every stage of the work, from how a journalist enters a community to how the final images are distributed around the world. Bothma argues that photojournalists have to resist ethnocentrism and make a serious effort to understand people within their own cultural and social contexts rather than viewing them through assumptions imported from elsewhere. Dignity matters both in what the photographer chooses to show and in how the photographer behaves while making the image. His advice is to tread lightly, remain aware of the consequences of one’s actions and treat the people in front of the camera as one would want to be treated oneself. That requires a photographer to be mentally present as well. Bothma believes a journalist must learn to quiet both the external noise of an assignment and the internal noise of their own reactions if they are going to properly observe what is happening and make photographs that are fair to the people involved.
At the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, where Bothma works as Visual Editor, that philosophy has become part of a broader approach to building long-form investigations. His role often places him inside complex projects involving reporters, editors, data scientists, communications staff, project teams and photographers working across several countries. Instead of waiting until the written investigation is nearly complete and then looking for images to accompany it, Bothma argues that visual storytelling has to be considered from the very beginning. At the concept stage, he works with the wider team to understand the story in its entirety and to identify where the visual reporting might uncover dimensions of the investigation that words or data cannot communicate on their own.
That approach is necessarily flexible because investigative reporting rarely follows exactly the path imagined at the start. Information emerges gradually, sources change the direction of the reporting and an issue that initially seemed central can become less important as new evidence appears. Bothma therefore sees the visual strategy as a living process. There is an initial plan, but the plan evolves alongside the journalism. He continually looks for the parts of an investigation that might be visually compelling and, more importantly, for the human elements that can help readers understand what the investigation means in practice. Those become the points around which a visual narrative can be built.
The distinction is important because Bothma does not believe photography should simply illustrate the written story. “We do not use visual journalism to simply add visuals to what the copy is talking about,” he says. The objective is to create images that contribute new information and emotion, building a parallel narrative with its own structure. At CCIJ, he describes the strongest investigations as resting on three equal pillars: data, visuals and copy. Each should be capable of carrying a meaningful part of the journalism rather than functioning as decoration for another. When the process works properly, he says, the photographs should be able to stand as a complete story even without accompanying words.
This emphasis on visual journalism as journalism rather than decoration also shapes the way Bothma mentors younger photographers. Developing and expanding CCIJ’s network of visual journalists is an important part of his work, particularly among photographers from previously disadvantaged communities, young photojournalists and women. He wants emerging photographers to have access not only to assignments but also to the editorial thinking that turns individual images into serious journalism. One of the ideas he pushes back against most strongly is the increasingly common description of journalists as “content creators.” For Bothma, the terminology reflects a wider problem in an attention economy that rewards speed, spectacle and easily consumed fragments. “We are not creating content,” he says. “We are documenting reality and telling stories.”
The distinction carries real consequences for how young photographers approach their work. Photojournalism, in Bothma’s view, cannot be reduced to producing a dramatic image that performs well on social media or captures attention for a few seconds. Journalism requires time, context, accuracy and an understanding of why a story matters. It also requires a willingness to stay with a subject long enough to understand it rather than constantly searching for the next sensational frame. His concern is that young photographers growing up inside digital media environments can easily be taught to think first about what will attract attention rather than what will most truthfully represent the story. Strong photojournalism, he argues, must reverse that priority and begin with the obligation to document reality as authentically and factually as possible.
Bothma’s commitment to developing other photographers has also extended beyond his work at CCIJ. In 2015, together with Justin Scholk, he launched Globephoto, a project that teaches photography to children from different communities and uses visual storytelling as a way of helping bridge South Africa’s social divide. In 2023, he founded Matrix Images, a photojournalism agency, and the same year became a Reuters contract photographer covering stories across Africa. These projects sit alongside a career that has already taken him through extraordinary political, social and geographic territory, but Bothma remains interested in what comes next rather than treating the past three decades as a completed body of work.
What has changed is the kind of story he increasingly wants to tell. After years spent covering wars, conflict and difficult social issues, Bothma says he is now more drawn to sport and to stories that reveal something hopeful about people. This does not mean he believes conflict or injustice should receive less attention. Those stories remain necessary, and he is clear about their importance. He simply no longer feels that he personally has to be the photographer responsible for documenting all of them. Sport offers another kind of intensity, one that still gives him access to the extreme moments he has always found photographically compelling but allows him to explore resilience, discipline, connection and possibility rather than only suffering.
In that sense, the shift is less a departure from the work Bothma has always done than another expression of the same curiosity that first drew him away from academic anthropology and into the streets of a changing South Africa. He remains interested in what people reveal about themselves when circumstances push them beyond the ordinary. After spending much of his career photographing humanity under pressure through war, political upheaval and disaster, he is increasingly interested in the other side of that equation: what human beings look like when they strive, endure, connect and overcome. In a world he describes as filled with a great deal of “doom and gloom,” he wants to make room for stories that inspire and educate while revealing what he calls the incredible human condition and the indomitable human spirit.
Cartier-Bresson continued making photographs into old age, and Bothma returns to that example when he talks about his own future. Photography, to him, is not something a person eventually finishes learning. Every assignment presents another problem of observation, ethics, timing, composition and understanding. Every subject demands a slightly different way of seeing. Even after thousands of assignments and more than three decades behind the camera, he still describes himself as a student of the form. Perhaps that is why the idea of the decisive moment remains so powerful to him. The photographer can prepare, observe and anticipate, but ultimately the moment still has to reveal itself. Bothma’s work is to keep looking closely enough to recognise it when it does.
This is much closer to the long-form narrative style you usually prefer: fewer artificial pauses, fuller paragraphs, and each idea carrying naturally into the next.