Gary Hirson is a South African photographer whose work spans social documentary, portraiture, travel and reportage, with a particular interest in capturing the realities of everyday life and the people who inhabit it.

After leaving the corporate world in 1998 to pursue photography professionally, he developed his craft assisting international photographers before working in London, where he refined his understanding of studio and indoor lighting. Although he initially worked in fashion photography, his interest gradually shifted towards portraiture and, ultimately, social documentary — the genre that remains at the heart of his practice.

His long-term documentary projects explore the intersection of people, labour and place. In 2010, he secured permission to photograph the Southern Line railway between Cape Town and Simon’s Town, resulting in Down the Line (2012), a coffee-table book documenting the lives of commuters on one of South Africa’s oldest railway lines. His second book, Changing the Lines (2017), documents the annual maintenance shutdown of the cable car on Table Mountain, capturing the people, machinery and remarkable engineering feats involved in maintaining the cableway.

Gary has exhibited locally and internationally, and his work forms part of the permanent exhibition at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne. In 2022, 32 of his photographs were included in the museum’s Ropeway and Tourism exhibition, representing the only African contribution to the museum’s collection in this field.