Winer is a veteran South African freelance photojournalist. His work has been syndicated internationally by Camera Press agency (London) and published by a wide range of foreign mass media publications. The banned, London-based International Defense and Aid Fund for SA commissioned him in 1973 to obtain clandestine photographs of apartheid conditions in SA for international anti-apartheid campaigns. He was arrested eventually by SA security police on trumped up allegations of “terrorism”, spent 90 days in detention, and was threatened with the death penalty in terms of the General Law Amendment Act, which made provision for the sentencing to death of activists who campaigned abroad for trade and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. In 1977 he went into exile for 13 years. He has lived and worked in Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, UK, and Zimbabwe, eventually returning to SA in 1990, when exiled activists could return without fear of prosecution.
