Being There is an Artist's publication develped during lockdown in South Africa. It has been published by Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town in an edition of 300 copies just a few weeks ago.

As Jo Ractiffe explains "Being There emerged as a query during a conversation with art historian Daniela Montelongo in 2019. The question was how to photograph when one cannot be ‘in place’. Then I was thinking about the constraints of physical disability, but with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant periods of lockdown, this question took on a different inflection. Like so many people everywhere, my experience of local and international events and my interactions with family, friends, colleagues and students have been mediated by a screen. How then to work photographically when at such a remove from a direct embodied encounter? How to bear witness and speak to desire, loss, horror or violence?..."