In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here. 
#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}João Silva was among a handful of photographers who made their reputation chronicling the fall of apartheid in South Africa. While he has gone on to cover conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he still lives and works in South Africa, even photographing mourners gathering in front of Nelson Mandela’s home on Friday (below). Mr. Silva recalls covering those momentous years leading up to and after Mr. Mandela’s election as South Africa’s first black president in a conversation with Shreeya Sinha, an editor at the international desk, which has been edited. More photos by Mr. Silva of Mr. Mandela, and recollections by other photographers, were publised Friday in a multimedia feature.
What brought you to South Africa?
My parents immigrated to South Africa when I was a kid. Growing up in South Africa I was like any other immigrant kid learning the culture. South Africa, back then, was a polarized country. As a child growing up in South Africa, you are pretty much protected from the world around you, so as a young kid, you had no real understanding of what was happening politically around the country.
What awareness did you have of apartheid?
South Africa was a segregated society, completely; you lived in bubbles. I very much lived in a white-bubble world. So growing up in school, I never got to see it in the public media. When I rebelled and broke away and kind of found my political boundaries, I become aware that such a man [Nelson Mandela] existed. That this hypocritical, oppressive government existed.
These are political awakenings, but growing up in that political white bubble, it was not existent. My parents never spoke about it. I had no understanding who Mandela was. I lived in my little bubble and that’s exactly the way the government wanted the country to be. So I was very much a victim of that, if you want to call it a victim. I had no idea â€" my friends growing up, we were into playing sports and discos and the things that teenagers do. And it sounds bizarre, but that’s the way it was for kids growing up during apartheid under the white supremacist rule, which favored me. I wasn’t oppressed in any way â€" it favored me.
Joao Silva/The New York Times South Africans mourned in Houghton, Johannesburg, outside the home of Nelson Mandela, who died Thursday after a long illness.Your training ground was South Africa. What made you pick up a camera and shoot there? What were the early years like?
In my early 20s, I picked up photography and started using it as a tool to show the world around me and what I was experiencing. As a photojournalist, I documented the end of apartheid and the violence that became associated with it.
There was no real choice. I wanted to be a photographer to document the world around me. And the world around me was apartheid coming to an end, and all this violence that was going on as a result of the unbanning of the political parties â€" a lot of it instigated by the government.
I was photographing for a local newspaper, one of these free newspapers, where there wasn’t really much interest in what was happening in the black communities, it was mostly about what was happening in the white communities. I had to break away from that and go document what I felt was the reality of South Africa.
And I found myself witnessing all this mass mayhem all over the country. For those four years up until the point that apartheid came to an end and then beyond, because violence actually continued for at least another year in certain areas.
What was it like when Mandela was freed?
I was a freelancer in the urban skyscraper environment in Johannesburg. Hillbrow, which is a highly dense area. I lived in an apartment and people just came out of nowhere in the streets and started celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela. And even back then in the apartheid Hillbrow, this neighborhood was very much a mixed area; it was very cosmopolitan.
It would be months after that when I actually got to photograph him. The first time I got to photograph him would have been the summer of 1991.
Growing up at school or even as a young adult, the images of Mandela were banned by the apartheid government. Nobody really knew what he looked like. At that point, when I finally photographed him, there had already been many, many pictures of him in newspapers because he had been released a few months before, but it was the first time I was seeing him. It was a press conference at Winnie Mandela’s house. It was outdoors, this long table sitting out in the yard. And all these faces sitting beyond this table, and I remember trying to identify where is Mandela, because I hadn’t seen him yet. And of course, he was easy to identify, he was sitting right in the middle of the table.
That was the first time, and sadly I didn’t get to spend much time with Mandela. I photographed him on numerous occasions, but my focus back then was photographing the violence that was going on. Many times, I would photograph Mandela in places that were volatile. There would be the potential for violence as a result of his presence.
João Silva/Associated Press A man with a superficial head wound outside the African National Congress headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. Nine people were killed when gunmen opened fire from the building on Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party supporters protesting the coming general elections. 1994.That was partly because the Freedom Party at the time, which was incredibly militant, there would be violence as a result. I recently found on a sheet of color negatives from the time, I have four frames that are linked together. In two of the frames, there are pictures of Nelson Mandela and then the following frames are images of somebody who is being severely injured as a result of violence. And that, to me, is so representative of the time and how volatile it was. At one minute, you’d be covering Nelson Mandela and then there’d be some kind of commotion in the area and suddenly you’d be witnessing somebody’s death or the aftermath of somebody being killed.
How often were you able to photograph him, and did he change during your time?
My period with Mandela was brief, relatively speaking. I focused on him when I had to during those periods between 1990 through to 1994. And then my career continued and I started traveling more and more abroad. To the point that my focus became mostly Afghanistan and Iraq.
I photographed him a few times after 1999. In 2008, I noticed how much he had aged and how much more frail he had looked, because so many years had passed in between the times I had seen him. He visibly really had aged, and that was quite shocking. I have a picture of him being helped by Jacob Zuma (below), and that stuck with me for a long time after because I knew Mandela was getting older and then to see him that visibly frail was quite incredible because in your mind, he’s frozen. He’s this image of this man walking to freedom. But like everybody else, we get old and we die. And l saw firsthand his frailty in 2008, and I hadn’t photographed him since.
What was it like being around him?
The man was incredibly charismatic. He was a people person, very comfortable around people. Loved being around children â€" he was just so easily approachable. And back then, as a photographer, he wasn’t president, there wasn’t all these restrictions around him. You could really get up close and photograph him very, very close and intimate distance. You can see it in the images. He fills the frame from very close up. With a wide-angle lens, and yeah, he was quite comfortable in front of the camera as he was comfortable around people. I guess a photographer’s dream.
What does he mean to you?
He brought freedom. He’s it, that messiah almost. I was a child in that white bubble. How black Africans suffered was not a concern of mine because I was a kid that lived in this bubble. He became this icon of rebellion, this icon of liberation. He’s been with me ever since. My career kicked off about the time he was freed â€" 1990, I started shooting a year before that, and now I’m seeing him go. It’s like it’s gone full circle, if you know what I mean.
And now?
South Africa faces challenges whether he’s present or not. South Africa faces challenges. We have this huge inequality between rich and poor. Poverty is going to destroy this country if it is not addressed by the political powers. If there’s no political willpower to deal with the poor, it’s a ticking time bomb.
In many ways, South Africa has become an issue of class. It’s those who have and those who don’t have. I think South Africa faces many challenges, but those challenges are there whether Mandela lives or dies. Can we live up to expectations? Whose expectations?
João Silva/The New York Times Nelson Mandela walked offstage, assisted by the presidential candidate Jacob Zuma at an African National Congress pre-election rally in a Johannesburg stadium on April 20, 2009.Follow @ShreeyaSinha and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
