Ear-to-ear smiles and layers of satin and tulle flood each frame of Alice Mann’s sophomore photobook, ‘The Night Is Young’. Celebrating matric dances, which mark the end of high school in South Africa, these elaborate, long-anticipated affairs are ripe with the aspirations of the country’s youth. Mann’s smooth Pentax 67 lens is both intimate and nostalgic, recalling her own nerves surrounding her matric dance. “All that preparation makes you feel like a million bucks on the night,” the Cape Town-educated artist tells us. “That’s something that everybody shares; the collective consciousness of the experience.”

Following the acclaim of her 2023 debut monograph, ‘Drummies’, which documents the drumming majorettes of the Cape Flats, here Mann continues to explore the hopes and self-fashioning of a new generation. “I like the idea that the books I make can contribute to a visual understanding of South Africa in a way that offers something different to what people already know,” she says.

Shot between 2018 and 2023, ‘The Night is Young’ gathers portraits and dancefloor scenes from 13 matric dances across Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. The process gave her access to both private and public schools, each shaped by vastly different resources, expectations, locations and histories. Several are located on the Cape Flats, an area still marked by the forced removals of the Group Areas Act and the economic marginalisation that followed. While the book does not foreground inequality explicitly, for those familiar with the country’s geography, the disparities are legible.

What reads in abundance is the glamour of the school-leavers as they face the weight of their milestone night and year. This visual spectacle connects ‘The Night Is Young’ with both the schoolgirls who dress their discipline and determination as ‘Drummies’, and poised sibling ballroom duo Tehillah and Corbon Anthony in ‘First Waltz’ – first shot for NATAAL magazine and recently featured in our 10th anniversary exhibition at Jajjah Marrakech. “I’m very interested in what it means to be a young South African and the link between dress, identity, and performance,” she says. This perspective led her to curator and author Catherine E. McKinley, whose book ‘The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women’ explores the power of dress. She contributes an essay to The Night Is Young, referring to the night as “a dance before the slaughter of adulthood.” This sits alongside a poem by Maureen Onwunali.

Across her practice, Mann captures both the remarkable and the ordinary, working with her subjects to reveal not just how they are seen, but how they wish to be seen. Each student she photographed is claiming these chosen versions of themselves and what emerges is a body of work that celebrates them at their best, across diverse social and economic contexts.

Photography, Mann suggests, has always hovered over truth and aspiration, so rather than resisting the instability of “post-documentary photography”, she leans into it to communicate the realness of her subjects and the lives they inhabit. “Images are everywhere and they shape how we understand the world. I think a lot about how I can contribute images that show an alternate reality to the one we’re used to seeing.” In that sense, her photobooks also attempt to widen the visual vocabulary through which South Africa is understood. Yet in a country where the camera functioned as a crucial instrument of political witness of apartheid, the artform has never been neutral.

Mann is acutely aware of that legacy and the power dynamics of holding a camera, especially as a white South African woman. The backlash from her 2014 series ‘Domestic Bliss’, which sparked debate about race and representation, reinforced her sense of responsibility. “There’s a lot of care that has to go into how images are made and how they circulate,” she adds. “Each photo I take really is a labour of love.”

Often, she finds that the most compelling images emerge when her subjects take the lead. “What they want to show is always much more amazing than what I could imagine,” she says, recalling being blown away by the first matric dance she documented. With each successive night she was left with something unexpected: optimism, and it’s a high she’s still riding as she reflects on the five years it took to complete the book, during which she stayed true to the instinct that has guided her practice from the beginning: a fascination with people and the stories they carry. Ultimately what the viewer will discover is a generation that is articulate, engaged, and remarkably self-aware as they prepare to go out into the world. “It does really give you a feeling of hope – the youth are okay.”