The intersecting lives of family members and close friends illustrate the issues of identity that are part of the constant flow of life. Their histories, way of life and future ideals are fundamentally defined by the place they belong too. My extended family, are white South Africans. They are part of a European enclave that sailed south in a time when Europe’s long reaching fingers spread across Africa. Now, this presence is no more than a small archipelago, the odds and ends of another age. In 1998, after living outside of South Africa for a decade, I began to look at a collection of early family photographs. The perspective of distance, tinged with longing, made me realize that these pictures illustrated an intrinsic view of the white microcosm in which we grew up. This realization was sharpened by watching the rapidly changing political and social climate in South Africa during the dramatic 90’s. These reflections led me to the idea of examining my family’s contemporary place within the new political, social and cultural dispensation. By photographing the daily lives of my family and friends, their surroundings, moments of intimate interaction with each other, and solitary moments within the landscape, the project has come to represent a certain societal existence within South Africa. It is an existence, which is often an uneasy and unlikely balance between the powerful western values which define them, and the immanent African landscape into which they were born. Those who passionately hold to their birthplace engage deeply with the land. Land they have been allowed to inhabit so much of due to the structures of the past. Thus, within a new African democracy attempting to cast off the shackles of apartheid, South Africans find themselves in an ongoing appraisal of their longings, their fears and their commitment to their homeland.