How Dutch photographer Lotte van Raalte captured the musical spirit of Cape Town for Appelsap

First linking up with Appelsap through her agency, the festival crew has become a family of creatives that celebrates diversity. The campaign features a series of images that focus on mundane everyday details, highlighting the beauty of Cape Town’s nuances, and there’s a distinctive style of capturing subjects during their own interactions. The visuals feature the everyday fashions and life of Cape Town’s youth, through the portrayal of boxers peeking out of trousers, boat shoes, patterned shirts and hanging round by the park’s swings.

ONE LOVE marks their forthcoming one-day festival in Amsterdam. So far, Lil Wayne, 67 and Siobhan Bell have already been confirmed for the line-up with more names to announced soon. Below, we catch up with Lotte van Raalte and Appelsap founder Reiger to discuss the ONE LOVE campaign.

Tell us a little bit about your time spent in Cape Town?

Lotte van Raalte: Last year I lived in Cape Town for two months to work (fashion and documentary). I found out soon that there are so many beautiful and interesting people in and around Cape Town, so I didn’t limit myself by just shooting ‘models’. I actually always prefer street casting over the average ‘picture perfect’ models. It needs to be a character, someone with a story, something in their eyes or energy.

Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it’s a strange city too; the inequality and discrimination between people living so close to each other.

I didn’t want to go on a quick ‘township tour’ to take some nice shots; I really wanted to learn about their lives and give something back. That’s why I started to teach photography in township Langa. By the end of the two months, we created a photography exhibition in their own township with Project I AM – the township film school.

Sara Nix, the producer of Project I AM (who also works at my agency) then spoke to me about Appelsap maybe wanting to shoot next year’s campaign in Cape Town. So, one year later it actually happened! Sara, Rogier Smalhout (founder and creative director of Appelsap), Basha (director and also part of Project I AM) and I went back to give workshops in Langa and asked the students to assist us while shooting and filming the Appelsap campaign.

What were you trying to capture in the images?

Lotte van Raalte: We wanted to celebrate the diversity of people and create something positive from it. Together with some of the people I met last year, we started casting. Appelsap also contacted some amazing artists from Cape Town. So in the end, I think we shot around 30 people from different backgrounds; music artists, designers, students, we even asked people that were walking by on the streets. The ONE LOVE concept that Rogier created is very clear, but you’re never sure until the day itself if everything comes together. But it totally did. Every single person working on this campaign brought such positive energy. I think you can definitely tell this shoot was made by a lot of people with a lot of LOVE! The Appelsap family has definitely expanded this year.