PHOTOGRAPHY: Charl Blignaut
IN an essay titled “Avoiding the Event”, Western Cape academic Jane Taylor writes briefly about the steady shift from political content to personal introspection that has come to signify much of the exhibited photography of South Africa in the 1990s.
The essay serves as a preface in a catalogue for a show of contemporary South African photography called PhotoSynthesis due to open at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown before embarking on a national tour.
Generated by the South African National Gallery, a particularly devout patron of local photography, PhotoSynthesis – curated by Kathleen Grundlingh with Anele Ngoko and Thobile Skepe – is long overdue. For very long now there has been a perception that South African photography is primarily about bullets over townships and cowboy- aesthete lensmen confronting political turmoil, bringing the truth on to the front pages of our newspapers.
And several of those photographers have earned the highest international accolades.
“The weight of the image was its apparently unmediated content,” writes Taylor. “This convention is undergoing significant revision.”
Just like struggle theatre threw apartheid back at itself, but left behind it a void, that void is gradually being filled by personal depictions and experimentations. That a national collection of alternative photographs now exists is significant.
The focus between the event and the non- event is blurring. Marginalised experiments with form and content and the framing of photographs can take on formal meaning; inspection of the psyche, the body and the family has shifted in to view.
In PhotoSynthesis the boundaries are blurred between the personal and the political. Truth no longer rests on solid ground: the language of the lens has changed.
PhotoSynthesis is on at the Grahamstown Arts Festival from July 3 to 13 before moving on to the SA National Gallery in Cape Town, the Johannesburg Gallery and the Durban Gallery