Outsiders may picture downtown Johannesburg as a crime scene with filthy streets, but a camera lens captures it as a living space for individuals and an ever-changing environment.
Photographers working with the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s project, Johannesburg Circa Now, are presently exhibiting different stories about the city — anything from a homeless woman eking out a living on the streets to the towering buildings and sheep hooves that are sold on the congested pavements. For Johannesburg Circa Now curators Terry Kurgan and Jo Ractliffe, the exhibition — which was launched on Thursday last week and will run until October 11 — aims to reflect, rather than construct, an image of the city.
The documentary works show the positive side of life that ordinary people rarely notice. The homeless woman, for example, is not captured grimacing from hunger but reading a magazine. Street kids in Hillbrow are not sniffing glue or rummaging through rubbish for food but are playing and smiling. Ractliffe, whose work focuses on the landscape and structural renewal in the inner city over the past four years, said she came to Jo’burg as an adult and saw it differently.
Ractliffe, whose works form a centre-piece in the exhibition, has documented development in Johannesburg using a toy plastic camera. “Johannesburg is not static like Cape Town, which looks the same all the time. In my work the mine dumps, for example, present an image that people don’t expect and don’t think about,” she says. “The city is changing. Johannesburg is not a place you can apprehend in any fixed way; it reveals itself as a continually shifting phenomenon. There’s so much regeneration and art should definitely be part of it.”
Kurgan on the other hand is trying to fuse the Eurocentric image of the Johannesburg Art Gallery with the vibrant environment on its doorstep at the Joubert Park precinct. Her project involves working with 40 park photographers. Some of these have occupied permanent working spots at the park for more than 20 years. “The challenge is how to fit in the gallery with the environment of the precinct as an emblem of Johannesburg’s contradictions,” Kurgan says.
She has taken a series of portraits of the photographers, mostly from Limpopo and Zimbabwe. The installation also includes colonial-era portraits belonging to the gallery. These are incorporated into a mosaic of snapshots that customers of the park snappers have never claimed. According to Kurgan, the formally posed snapshots of people in the park “are about who the people want to be, their fantasies. The display of the photos shows contradicting things along each — the gallery and the Joubert Park environment. The gallery has always been about a British or European way of life.”
Siphiwe Zwane, who documented street kids from Hillbrow, says he was afraid he would be mugged or attacked when he first met the children. “But when one of the children approached me for money, with a smile on his face, it changed the way I saw the children who call the streets of Hillbrow their home.”
Lwazi Hlophe has captured images of nameless people, street corners and other incidental things that he sees on his way home. For Hlope the ride home is something of a metaphor for life: “It’s about things like the taxi sign, done with an unconvincing hand. It’s my sonnet. And it’s not so much about the end, it’s all about the journey.”
Sizwe samaYende is a writing fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research