JAMES OATWAY

James Oatway is an editor, newsroom leader and photojournalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

He has 25 years of intensive visual storytelling experience, working both as a photographer and editor. Currently, he is the Visual Director of Our City News and Joburg Speaks, two exciting new journalism projects in South Africa, supported by the Henry Nxumalo Foundation.

Previously, he led Reuters' photo and video coverage across Sub-Saharan Africa, working with teams to cover breaking news, politics, culture and everyday life, often in challenging situations. Together, the team captured some of the region’s most significant political, economic and cultural moments.

Deployed to the Middle East in the wake of October 7, he supported the photo teams in Israel and the West Bank both as an editor and a photographer. Between 2022 and 2025 he served as a director on the board of the Reuters Centenary Fund, a UK registered charity set-up to assist former and current Reuters staff in need of urgent assistance.

He graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Journalism degree in 2000. His photographic work has predominantly revolved around themes of social inequality, migration and people affected by conflict. He has covered major international stories around Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Haiti.

He is co-author of The Battle of Bangui (Penguin Random House, 2021), a non-fiction book documenting one of the key events of the 2013 coup in the Central African Republic.

Oatway is represented internationally by photo agency, Panos Pictures.

He was the former Chief Photographer and Picture Editor of the Sunday Times newspaper (2015) before leaving to pursue a career as a freelancer.

On 18 April 2015, during a wave of xenophobic violence, he photographed the murder of a Mozambican migrant by South African men. The man’s name was Emmanuel Sithole and the images of his death sparked outrage and made international headlines. The South African army was deployed to quell the violence and mass demonstrations were held in the region.

In 2015 he was named the South African Journalist of the Year. In 2018 his Red Ants project won the prestigious Visa d’or Feature Award at the Visa Pour l’image Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan, France.

His work has been received various international awards including multiple Pictures of the Year International (POYi) awards, most recently an “Award of Excellence” in the coveted Photography Book of the Year category, for [BR]OTHER, (Jacana, 2021), a photographic book on the topic of xenophobic violence in South Africa which he published together with Alon Skuy.