HAZELFRIEDMAN looks at photographer Jo Ractliffe’s studies of the ephemeral
`I HAVE a curiosity about what photographs don’t do. What they leave out, their silence and the spaces they occupy between reality and desire.” Jo Ractliffe is treading on uncertain turf. She’s talking about subverting the very basis of a medium whose status, particularly given the tradition of South African documentary photography, is that of incontrovertible truth-teller.
Unlike the shots that frame the instant and freeze the fleeting, Ractliffe’s snaps are studies of ephemerality. They are the drive-by kind you take from a moving car. The blurry, murky, now-you-see-it-now-you- don’t kind that can’t be neatly tucked ino the picture frame and presented as transparent fact. It is, after all, the fictions of represenation that matter to Ractliffe; the politics of the unconscious and the paradoxes inherent in capturing what eludes captivity.
Though she belongs to that endangered species of artist who is still able to get on with the job quietly, the volume of her artistic voice is getting louder. It began with her second solo show, the ill-fated Shooting Diana, held in May 1995, which was renamed Re Shooting Diana three months later because the entire grid on which 60 images were displayed collapsed.
As the title suggested, Shooting Diana involved using a cheap plastic toy Diana camera after her professional equipment was stolen. The obvious limitations of the camera suddenly presented themselves as opportunities to free photographs from the conventions of narrative and resurrect the fluid, less concrete aspects of memory and the imagination.
She achieved this making a montage of works like Russian fim-maker Sergei Eisenstein developed his filmic dialectic: through editing disparate images and sequences to establish disjunctive associations. Ractliffe moved from a stills tradition to a moving one, as in evident from her video currently on display in Zone at the Generator Art Space.
“I’ve always been interested in film,” she says, “I don’t really think cinematically but rather in terms of stills.” Named Incidental, this work consists of a short video playing a dream sky. It was inspired by a newspaper report of a military jet that crashed into a school in Bologna, Italy.
Initially Ractliffe was pissed off with her efforts. Placed under the images, they read like explanatory subtitles. She wanted the words to be less explicit, less literal, for the image of the turbulent sky to be freed from the role of textual illustration, and the work unhindered by the cushioning conventions of storytelling.
Ultimately, although admittedly tentative, the work succeeds as a sensitive essay on anxiety. Ractliffe refrains from making literal allusions to the airplane crash. The only direct reference is in the form of the text reproduced on the gallery floor. In many ways it is a mood poem. It speaks of impermanence; the helpless anxiety of not knowing and the psychic spaces within the self that few artists have the courage to explore.
Jo Ractliffe’s work is at the Generator Art Space in Newtown, Johannesburg, until May 3