09-05-2025
Meet Ikanyeng Rammutla - the photographer behind some of SA's top films
Ikanyeng Rammutla is an award-winning photographer.
He developed the full EPK for Heart of the Hunter.
He uses his background in actuarial science to enhance his photography.
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What started out in 2016 as a hobby and side-hustle with a few high school friends at Selly Park Secondary School in Rustenburg, has grown and blossomed into a fully-fleshed career.
Today, Ikanyeng Rammutla is not only a photographer behind Heart of the Hunter, Netflix's first English African original, but he's also been named South Africa's top photographer by Aftershoot, an AI-driven software focused on photography workflow.
For him, photography is more than just visuals; it's about telling stories that express purpose and meaning.
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Photography as a means of African consciousness
'For the first time in a really long time, Africans have the technology, skills and storytelling ability to raise self-awareness and advance community consciousness especially within African contexts,' he notes.
Through the use of tools, he paints a picture of Africans being able to 'reflect the beauty and richness that we are, not solely from the perspective of Western culture but from the perspective of the one who lives and sees the stories every day'.
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Several modern multidisciplinary artists and social commentators that have inspired his journey as a contemporary visual artist include Rich Mnisi, Neo Baepi and Trevor Stuurman among others.
Like many other professions, photography requires precision and intentionality, a careful balance of technical skill and creative vision.
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Approaching the art of photography
As a photographer with a Bachelor of Science degree in actuarial science and mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, this background has helped him shape his eye as a visual artist, especially in composition, timing and narrative structure.
'My undivided love for science, mathematics, religion and art, has since led to an obsessive and rather novel approach to the age-old art of photography,' he shares.
'For me, composition, timing and narrative structure are both an artistic expression of creativity and a mathematical practice of precision.'
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Studying actuarial science has contributed to his idea of reality being fundamentally a construct of information:
'What light and darkness consists of, what we experience as 'reality' and what we understand as the knowledge we have is merely information. The natural progression of this idea, as I have explored over the past 10 years of my career as a photographer-mathematician, is that creativity is essentially the expression and generation of new information.'
When it comes to working with internationally recognised Netflix productions, Ikanyeng tells us all there is to know about his creative process.
It is a rigorous pre-production process that includes 'elaborate creative briefs, clear media outcomes, collecting creative inspiration and references (mood boards and brainstorming), allocation of appropriate production budgets, sourcing of passionate creative talent, deep understanding of cultural context (for example in Lobola Man), autonomous creative direction, team work, efficient logistics and business operations, sufficient room for error, use of advanced production technology and equipment.'
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