Here Tomorrow, Gone Today

Jaco S. Venter | Limited Edition Photographic Collection

Best known as the drummer of South African alternative rock band Fokofpolisiekar, Jaco S. Venter has spent nearly two decades immersed in the country's alternative music scene.
Yet alongside the intensity of the stage, Venter has cultivated a distinctive photographic practice, documenting the people, places and passing moments that make up life around music - and more specifically, one of the greatest band journeys South Africa has ever seen.

Initially inspired by skateboarding culture and the photojournalistic work of Liam Lynch, his approach is instinctive, observational and often unexpectedly intimate.

Situated somewhere between documentary photography and personal visual memoir, Venter's photographs offer an alternative perspective on the familiar mythology of rock 'n roll. Rather than relying on the spectacle of performance, his lens gravitates towards the in-between: the long roads, unfamiliar hotel rooms, late nights, fleeting encounters and curious juxtapositions of life on tour. These are photographs made from within the experience, by someone who is not merely observing the scene, but actively inhabiting it.

There is a particular significance to this kind of documentary practice in the context of contemporary music culture. In an age of carefully constructed public personas and endlessly circulating digital imagery, Venter's photographs offer something less rehearsed and more enduring. They capture fragments of lived experience, preserving the atmosphere and human detail of a subculture that has helped shape a generation of South African music. His preference for black and white further strips away the distractions of time and colour, allowing gesture, composition and atmosphere to take precedence.

First presented by Hugo Modern in 2021, this second release brings a new opportunity to encounter Venter's photographic work as a considered collection of limited-edition artworks. Presented in conjunction with In the Heat of It, the photographs invite us to look beyond the noise and mythology of the music industry, towards the moments that might otherwise disappear. Because the most compelling stories are often found not in the performance itself, but in everything that happens around it.

The second offering of these limited edition artworks will be released in 2026