Less than a minute into our interview, Brett Florens detects my Australian accent and gleefully reminds me of my home nation’s poor showing in last year’s Rugby World Cup: “What was Eddie Jones thinking?” he exclaims. Of course, Brett can afford to barrack and gloat – he’s from South Africa. I could remind him that Australia won the Cricket World Cup, but I bite my lip and remember the purpose of our meeting: to hear his insights and stories as one of the world’s leading wedding photographers. I wonder how many of his peers have taken such a dangerous and unorthodox path to this most traditional of genres.
Back in 1990, during the last years of the apartheid era, the rugby-mad 18-year-old from Durban was conscripted into the military as a riot unit policeman. Nelson Mandela had just been released from prison and South Africa’s first free elections were set for 1994, but the years in between were mired by bloody clashes between rival black political groups across the country.
“There were more people murdered per capita than killed in the war that was going on in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the time,” says Brett. “The most violence was in our area in the province of Kwazulu-Natal.”
The bloodshed and violence was so great in the early 1990s that police forensic photographers started refusing to go into the townships to photograph crime scenes, so the police formed a photographic unit within Brett’s riot unit. However, no one stepped forward to volunteer, not even Brett.
“I had zero interest in anything creative or photographic,” he recalls. “Then they said, ‘you get your own police
