An introduction from the artist
I'm Coltart Sithole. Also known as col_shots. I’m a South African visual artist. I'm doing an exhibition at the University of Portsmouth Library. The exhibition will be running from the 1st of August until the 31st of October. It is titled Perspective over Perception. The exhibition basically entails and tries to change the perceptions that people have about African culture and African lifestyles, more from the work that I've done in Southern Africa. In the countries of Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, South Africa itself.
Southern Africa, Seen from Within
I grew up with film grain under my nails. A battered Canon on a family trip to Durban was the first lens that taught me the sky is rarely just blue and a footpath is rarely just dust. Later, a borrowed digital compact followed me through Magoebaskloof’s forests and into Johannesburg rehearsal rooms, where friends and I were building an entertainment conglomerate (IIREI UNIVERSE) out of songs, streetwear and stubborn hope. I became the one who pressed record: merch shoots at dawn, music-video pickups at midnight, every fragile step between idea and applause.
Travel kept widening the frame. Border crossings into Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Botswana: each road peeled back another layer of assumption. With every kilometre I realised how quickly perception, second-hand stories, tourist filters, headlines shouted from far away, turns to dust when you stand on the ground itself. My camera became a notebook for perspective.
That tension names this exhibition: Perspective Over Perception. Thirty-seven images hang on the Library’s concrete and felt, asking a simple question: What changes when you look through someone else’s eyes before you decide what you’re seeing? I can’t tell British stories better than a Brit, nor Zambian stories better than a Zambian. But I can speak, with clarity and affection, for the streets and rhythms that raised me.
An uncle, a lamp, a lesson
One frame still stops my breath: “Uncle Charlie.” He once lived comfortably; then life’s tide retreated and left him sleeping beneath Johannesburg neon. I photographed him just before a studio session, light falling over creased hands that had ferried both prosperity and loss. The portrait reminds me, every time that dignity is not an address and that a camera can be a handshake instead of a spotlight.
Portsmouth: latitude of liberation
Moving to the south coast of England rewired my senses again. In Portsmouth I’m pleasantly anonymous, a chance to learn new systems, new vernacular, new constellations of friendship. The distance sharpens memory: township floodlights I used to call “UFOs,” the hush before a Lesotho dawn chorus, the way Cape dust clings to shoelaces. Showing these images here, to viewers who’ve never queued for a South-African taxi at 5 a.m., feels like carrying home soil in my pocket and tipping it gently onto a foreign table.
Invitation
Walk the Library corridors, pause beneath each print, and test your own sight lines:
Can you trade the neat safety of perception for the restless gift of perspective?
If you’d like to talk further, join me in September in the Library Café, when we’ll share stories of light, patience and the long road between lens and heart.
Interview with the artist
What drew you to photograph everyday life in Southern Africa?
What drew me to take photographs more consistently was the work that I did in terms of travelling. As I travel a lot and I started doing an entertainment conglomerate with friends of mine. So, within this entertainment company, I was the one in charge of visual direction in terms of merchandised shoots, music videos for artists and all of that. So, I started growing interest in documenting the process of creating the music, from recording stages up until final promotions of the music. So, with travelling, I managed to see different places and look at places with different perspectives other than how I perceived them before going there.
Why is the title Perspective over perception? What do you hope viewers will see differently?
Perspective over perception, the problem is within the current world and how people live, we tend to perceive things more than look at things from how other people have lived. So, we tend to perceive things rather than looking through things through their perspective, which aligns with understanding and how you do things and how other people live or why certain things happen to certain people, and all of that in the world. So, what I'm trying to achieve is, teach people Africa from an African’s perspective. As much as I can’t tell you stories about other countries as well as a local would. So that's more or less the intention.
Which image in this exhibition still moves you?
There's an image of Uncle Charlie. The image is quite interesting because I showed it, funny enough, before a studio session, in Johannesburg. I like that image so much because the stories about himself are quite inspiring and moving.
How have you found living and studying in Portsmouth?
That's been a crucial change and one of the most motivating things that I've wanted. Why, I wanted to do this exhibition, is to teach within a different environment. I mean, an environment where people don't more or less know me. So, I’ve more or less just created new friends when I got here. So, with, living here I feel quite liberated because I have the freedom of being unknown in an environment and I get to learn different forms of culture, different forms of living. I get to survive in different types of weather also. So, yeah, Portsmouth has been quite inspiring and encouraging per se, if I may say.
Exhibition
Perspective Over Perception is showing in the University Library from 1 August – 31 October 2025.
Public entry
Until 29 August – Members of the public aged 18 and over may present photographic ID at the Library Reception Desk during staffed hours to gain free entry.
From 30 August – Anyone who is not already a member of the University must apply in advance for a free External Library Membership to access the University Library. Adult external Library members get a library card allowing them free access to our print collections whenever the Library is open, as well as limited borrowing rights. Children must be signed in and accompanied at all times by a responsible adult.
Contributed by
@col_shots (Coltart Sithole)