How do we see ourselves in our fledgling democracy? NEVILLE DUBOW looks at the SA National Gallery’s exhibition of People’s Portraits
PEOPLE’S Portraits — a photographic project sponsored by the South African National Gallery and the Mail & Guardian — carried the following guidelines: “Entrants have complete freedom to express the spirit of humanity in any way they see fit, in order to illustrate their artistry, photographic skill and visual perception in depicting persons great and small.”
It’s arguable whether the spirit of humanity is expressed in order to illustrate artistry or skill, photographic or otherwise. But no matter: humanity wins in this exhibition, and, with some exceptions, the small have it over the great. Like life itself, the show is of uneven standard, but given its stated purpose (nurturing and encouraging), one can live with
It is ordinary in its subject matter, but not necessarily ordinary in its collective impact. There are enough quirks, oddities and revelations that float up to the surface to edge aside the banal and reward some close viewing. There is an interesting parallel between this exhibition and the TV series Ordinary People. Both offer insight into what the unsung among us go on doing beyond the floodlight of media hype. It is the quality of those insights — how people are seen, how they reveal themselves to the camera, how much is held back — that finally counts.
As for the great or small bit: of course we have our icons, and no prizes for guessing who the most prominent is. Nelson Mandela appears in two images. The first (by Jurgen Schadeburg) shows him looking meditatively out of his jail cell on Robben Island on a commemorative visit in 1993. Tonally, it is muted gray.
This brings into even sharper focus the counterpoint shot (by Karina Turok) in high-gloss colour. Here the president is in a formal suit, at the end of a presidential day, ensconced in a chandeliered official residence, feet propped up on a padded rest (soles of shoes scuffed), reading a newspaper with the headline “Supermarket strike settled”. The two images, in their own way, encapsulate the master narrative in our recent
If you want to pursue the theme of iconicity, there is a fallen icon in the form of a granite bust of Verwoerd stored somewhere in a state warehouse. The veil of plastic bubblewrap has fallen at the base. It acts like a kind of metaphysical cloud on which the image floats, or is about to sink through — take your choice. The picture is by Michael Hutchings.
But these are exceptions to the tenor of the show. Mostly it is about collective rites of passage — a kind of South African equivalent to the Family of Man theme that is part of photographic history. There are images of pregnancy; there are several of babies, some with mothers, others with grandmothers (Omar Badsha shows a tender Mrs Badsha and Grandchild). There are lovers, there are brides, there are some moving images of old age.
In any show that reflects South African reality while we wait for the RDP to deliver, poverty will always be a major theme. And so it is here. There is an uncomfortable relationship between affective photography and human misery. Mercifully this show is free of the exploitative impulse, though it is not without the familiar framing device, much used by South African photographers, in which poor people are shown in threadbare domestic interiors against a backdrop of dearly acquired consumer goods.
There are the occasional indicators of visions shaped by art-school conceptual thinking. The sharpest of them is by Jean Brundrit — a shot of two figures with heads and torsos blanked out and defined by stippled lines; it needs its title to make it resonate: Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa. Lien Botha, with her fragmented and collaged family portrait series (black face over white patriarchal figures), makes her point; as does Svea Josephy in her dismembered before-and- after compositions.
But it is the straightforward, uncontrived quality of the exhibition that is its overriding feature. Portraits are about relationships between viewer and viewed, an exchange of gaze, lines of sight. These reveal themselves in various ways: through the self- awareness of the “sitter”, or the knowing gaze of the photographer seizing on an unsuspecting subject. Occasionally, though, there are internal relationships that are brought out. There is a notable example of this in Beestekraal, a picture of a cowherd and a cow. The man eyes the cow with sidelong glance, speculatively, but with respect; the cow returns the gaze, ruminatively, back to the photographer and therefore to the viewer. It’s a calm image, even a reassuring one, a pastoral moment that seems to hold stillness in the grasp of its author, Gille.
At the other end of the scale, there is a visually stunning image that moves into the area of acute design sensibility. Sally Shorkend shows her sitter, Giovanna Bialla, leaning over a table, patterned, Matisse-like, with curved designs that echo the lines of the bentwood chair back. What makes the shot memorable is that Bialla’s hands are covered in white slip (or paint) which detaches them from their subject and turns them into a sort of votive offering.
So, how do we see ourselves? It depends on who is doing the seeing. Unlike most of the photographic shows one has seen over the past decades, this one comes with an open-ended agenda. It is not politically oriented in an overt sense, nor does it propagate a cause. Instead, it shows people getting on with their lives, posing for the camera to be sure, but not there just because of the camera. It offers the thought that, in the democratic era we are tentatively stumbling our way into, the most democratic tool of all is the 35mm camera. It allows just about everybody to record a moment, or make a statement which allows personal identification. Many of the names of those behind the camera are new to the exhibition circuit, which is
One would have liked the demographic spread of photographers to have been wider. But there is enough quality in the show, enough sharp edges, to make the point that, while it is not all that terribly difficult to take a passingly good picture, the medium remains as difficult as any other in which to make a really memorable one.
People’s Portraits runs at the South African National Gallery until November 5, after which it will tour the