Mike has had the pleasure of editing with these photographers and others, recently.

© Ian Martin/Getty Images

Ian Martin makes killer pictures. He tells stories. He’s smart, incisive and curious.

So what a joy it was when he asked me to edit his body of work about poor, white South Africans into a book. It’s a pleasure to work with him and his pictures.

If you haven’t noticed by reading my posts, I work from the principle of not working with jerks. I’ve never hired one, never put up with working with one - at least not longer than the situation required.

Ian had made what amounted to four essays during trips to South Africa after more or less stumbling on a small group of poor, white South Africans. A poor white was literally unheard of during apartheid. A Getty Grant allowed him to finish the work last fall.

Essays of varying lengths don’t hold together so well in book form so one challenge was to mesh the work into a continuous flow of photographs. Which for me is like taking the notes he’d made and sequencing them into a symphony. Pure pleasure.

South African Supreme Court Justice Albie Sachs has written the introduction for the book and South African designer Garth Walker is designing it.

It is a powerful body of work. All the photographs were made with Leicas and black and white film. There is grain, real grain, in the images. And true grit in the making of them.