diamond town girls

During the work in Cape Town, Hamblin found a close ally in one of the founders of both groups - Leigh Davids.  Davids, a trans sex worker herself and a growing leader in the global sex work movement moved to Kimberley and here they embarked on a second project together that investigates the experiences of transgender women who do sex work in a rural setting. What they found here is that the conditions of these women in a rural setting are ironically gentler than their counterparts in Cape Town. The sound installations relay their stories of police cooperation and other recounts of the small town, which has created, stigmatized but accepted spaces for the women. 

The abovementioned project resulted in an intimate photographic series, Diamond Town Girls. This series consists of small photographs of trans sex workers from Kimberly. The works depict these women isolated in their working environment. Hamblin’s use of light, sometimes theatrical, allows them to be the protagonists of their own stories. The images reveal the isolation these women often experience and work in, although they are often confronting the viewer in powerful portrait style.

Diamond Town Girls was funded by The Other Foundation and included in Jacana Publishers Gerald Kraak Anthology which a new award and anthology on the topics of gender, human rights and sexuality, for writers and photographers across Africa.