South African photography has reframed itself in the Nineties, writes Charl Blignaut
Had you taken a stroll through Johannesburg’s art galleries five years ago you would most likely have come across precious few shows devoted to photography. And those that were would almost certainly have comprised the kind of slick, dangerous, Pulitzer Prize-winning news photographs that documented South Africa’s turbulent political transition. You would also have happened upon several photographs vividly depicting the face of despair and poverty so commonly associated with the “dark continent”. But that was pretty much it.
South Africa had, from the 1976 uprising through its various states of emergency, bred a generation of brave, frontline political photographers who were unrivalled in their ability to bring to newspaper readers the black and white realities of the revolution – all the time aggravated by the state’s tight control of information.
It was an era in South African photography, says Western Cape academic Jane Taylor, obsessively devoted to “the event”, and while one cannot underestimate the value of these works, we should also recognise that we are guilty of having simultaneously neglected an entire tradition of art photography.
In her 1997 essay Avoiding the Event Taylor introduced a new generation of South African photographers – acquired by the South African National Gallery in Cape Town – who were beginning to look beyond the overtly political aspects of society. Our photography has, wrote Taylor, re-invented itself and begun to shift its gaze towards subtler, more complex issues such as the body, the family, the many formal ways in which works are presented, the deeper socio-political codes that shape society and, increasingly, our understanding of history.
Nowhere is Taylor’s assertion more evident than in that stroll through Johannesburg’s art galleries today, five years on. In November 1997 there are works by well over a dozen photographers hanging in Johannesburg. And, while landscapes and cityscapes are also beginning to blossom, what has really come to the fore is the relationship between the human subject and the camera: how we reveal ourselves.
The guide to these works that follows thus focuses on the art of portraiture currently showing in Johannesburg, much of which is visible thanks to the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, curated by Nigerian-born New Yorker Okwui Enwezor and forming a central part of his show Trade Routes: History and Geography at the Electric Workshop in Newtown.
“I made a conscious effort to include photography – both still and video – on the show,” says Enwezor, asserting that South Africans have traditionally not fully accepted the camera as a tool, like a paintbrush, with which to create art. “I wanted to show that this is the mode of production of many contemporary artists. But I also wanted to bring photos in not just to compel the gaze, but to explore the socio-political relationship we maintain with the image.”
Of all the photographers on show, South African Santu Mofokeng is perhaps the artist who has responded best to Enwezor’s curatorial agenda. His astonishing series The Black Photo Album: Look at Me 1890-1950 (9 and cover) is a series of slides of South Africa’s black middle class at the turn of the century, accompanied and consistently reframed by the use of text between the photographs.
Although arguably also South Africa’s most accomplished “new school” photographer (his latest work can be seen on the 1997 Vita finalists show at the Sandton Civic Gallery in Johannesburg), Mofokeng has here relied on his role as facilitator and has dug into the state archives in order to pose several questions about black South African identity.
“The black middle class,” notes Enwezor, “is a highly charged subject, offering both ambivalence and paradox.” Indeed. The subjects of Mofokeng’s archive are depicted as hankering for a certain European ideal: the fur carpets, elaborate pillar backdrops, suits and finery. Yet, at the same time, they seem somehow detached, as if asking their own questions about how we see them being seen.
“Who is gazing?” asks Mofokeng. “What was the occasion? Do these images serve to challenge prevailing Western perceptions of the African? Are these images evidence of mental colonisation?” Mofokeng is offering us a framework in which to make our own conclusions.
“And, of course, his intervention helps enliven the experience,” says Enwezor. What he means is that Mofokeng used slides to show the pictures – an example of how contemporary South African photography is beginning to play with how it presents itself. What, after all, is the difference between a slide and a print; a stills camera and a video camera?
Mofokeng’s piece finds several points of contact with another photographer on Enwezor’s show, the grand old man of Mali, Seydou Keta (see his story on page 4). Keta’s famous portraits of the inhabitants of Mali (10) offer a certain dignity and majesty in his lavish use of brocade and paisley cloth backdrops, maintaining a certain formal style. He was, after all, Mali’s state photographer for many years.
Again there is the clash between European aesthetics and African, but here Keta’s subjects seem to own their heritage. There is also a rather theatrical flair to the pictures that drops hints as to each subject’s background. Of course, it’s easy to claim the photos as a victory for innate African dignity when, in fact, says Keta, the subjects threatened to beat him up if they didn’t look good enough on camera.
Which takes a direct line to the working class portraits by Zwelethu Mthetwa (2). Here the backdrops are not brocade cloths, but familiar squatter pastings. And their pop iconography makes them seem grander than the circumstances suggest. You can draw your own conclusions about Mthetwa’s intentions, but you can’t shake the lingering sense of uneasy dignity that comes through the gaze of the subjects.
“Or the sociological repercussions of their decrepitude,” adds Enwezor. In all of these works there is a careful framing of social circumstance, digging beneath the surface of the political events that shaped these lives.
The subject of personal history and identity also permeates the work of Japanese artist Cho Duck-Hyun (11). She has chosen her subjects carefully, also from the state archive: the first educated woman in Japan; a nurse working with atomic-bomb victims; two sisters raised in the mountains … Hyun has imbued her subjects with an almost mythical, heroic iconography, yet maintained their hessian sack circumstance.
What makes the pictures even more interesting is that, although they look like lifesize photographs, the works are actually detailed drawings: photography is so absorbed in modern art that “painting” will attempt to imitate it.
And the same codes are brought to several other works under Enwezor’s exacting curatorial eye. The series of colour portraits in old frames of backwater Finnish bachelors (3) taken by Esko Mnnikk offers a study of masculinity and isolation.
The Penitentiary Series (4) of prisoners’ tattoos drawn from archives and blown up, cropped and reframed by Rosngela Renn speak volumes about the social codes of prison, offer an underlying eroticism and show how circumstance embellishes the body by way of a tattoo.
Which is all, of course, another unmistakable characteristic of contemporary photography: a meditation on the body. Along these lines the exhibitionistic self- portraits by acclaimed Nigerian photographer Oladl Ajiboy Bamgboy (1) form a highly erotic take on the black male body, sexuality and identity. In particular, there is a sense of isolation and transience in the ghostly overlays of a naked man in a room. The flesh becomes solid and disappears as it does in life and death. Or, as Enwezor puts it, “He is showing how gay desire [in Nigerian society] is so easily squashed and forced aside.”
But it is this focus on the body, identity and representation that has forced a counterpoint to Enwezor’s thinking in the form of the photographs of South African artist Candice Breitz (5). Attacked (by Enwezor) as racist for attempting to depict African women, Breitz has stirred up much debate this year. How responsible are we in who we represent? May we represent a people to which we don’t belong? Is there a universal identity at play?
If Enwezor’s photographers are politically correct, Breitz is not. As she plays with images of the self and the mutilated self in a way almost akin to pop art and advertising techniques, she is throwing issues up that will be unavoidable in the future and which there is not space enough to debate here.
Of course, photography today (and its focus on the body) is also increasingly the realm of commercial art, fashion, advertising and magazine production. On the other side of town in the Gallery on the Square in Sandton one can find the works of fashion photographer Herb Ritts (7) and his dubious portraits of the rich, famous and well- hung. It is astounding how shallow these sun-drenched pictures of the stars out to play seem in contrast to the earthy historical routes of the biennale.
And perhaps an even more vulgar rip-off of the Ritts work can be seen at the Firs shopping centre in Rosebank. It’s the latest coffee-table portrait collection by South African-based photographer Dook (8) and it sports lots of gym-types with horns and shells on and up their bodies.
But it would be wrong to dismiss the role of popular culture and the more perverse displays of the body and fashion (or shells and horns, for that matter) in the new photography. Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Larry Clark, Nan Golding, Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton have proved as much. What these photographers have done is bring to popular photography a sense of deeper meaning, while appealing to the broadest audience.
Of this school, fashion photographer Juergen Teller (6) is the new master. He is steadily returning the politics of the body to the world of glamour. Nowhere is this more evident than in his pictures of supermodels without make-up, scars and warts and greasy hair all revealed.
It is also perhaps important to take into account the reality that Teller produces his photos knowing that they will not hang in a gallery, but be framed in a magazine. The magazine has become the gallery and one could well ask what difference there might be between Kate Moss and Mona Lisa.
After all, almost our entire knowledge of art history, both ancient and contemporary, rests on photographs of the works that we have seen published in books.