Alex Sudheim On show in Durban
Fifty years ago, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson began pioneering the concept of photojournalism as an art form. With his spontaneous and sympathetic images of everyday life on the street, he removed photography from the stuffy confines of the studio and breathed into it the energy and immediacy of raw human experience.
Cartier-Bresson’s principal aim was to capture the unmediated moment. He strove to be invisible, to record those epicentral actions in the human diorama when the protagonists were being themselves, unconscious of being watched. His most famous photographs are like secrets revealed, reflections of instants in history whose transient inner core is frozen on film – a single image which speaks for an entire world.
Durban-based photographer Lance Slabbert extends Cartier-Bresson’s legacy, yet maintains a fundamental difference from the Frenchman’s approach. Whereas both are “street- photographers” or “photojournalists” seduced by the visual, symbolic and mysterious power of the restless flow of life on the street, Slabbert maintains a significant distinction from Cartier-Bresson in that he is not after those elusive moments where his subject is completely ignorant of the presence of the camera.
On the contrary, Slabbert pursues a different form of truth by making the subjects of his photographs radically aware of his presence. Erecting a makeshift studio on the pavements of Durban’s bustling Warwick Triangle, he simply asks all manner of passers-by to pose before his crinkly cloth backdrop. Thus, unlike Cartier- Bresson, he deliberately enters into a dialogue with the people he photographs, creating a fragile two- way street of communication, where the photographer feels as examined as the subject of his examination.
“When I was editing the pictures for the show,” says Slabbert, “I chose the ones where I felt a gaze coming back at me.” Thus, rather than being unremarkable depictions of random pedestrians, the images enter the complex realm of what cultural theorist Gordon Leach has termed “the negotiated space of viewing”.
Since the photographs exclusively portray black people, there might be grounds to accuse Slabbert of trendy ethnography: white boy with liberal sentiment attempting to get close to his black brothers but inadvertently re-inforcing the process of “othering” he is seeking to escape.
Yet Slabbert is aware of this potential critique, a fact reflected in the ironic title of his exhibtion, Mr Goodintent. At any rate his work transcends this accusation, for he is fully conscious of the warped cultural context he is working in and confronts it directly.
What redeems his project is his simple preparation to engage – the gnarly politics of representation in the intimidating socio-political framework of post-apartheid South Africa do not deter his straightforward desire to just get to meet people on the streets and capture the energy of streetlife. As Slabbert points out, “the theoretical issues are so complicated and irresolvable they confuse the act of practice”. In other words, the social scientists and rhetoriticians could spend an eternity picking out the ideological flaws of his approach, yet without someone out there practising there would be no theory to formulate; or if there were, it would be entirely abstract and useless.
At any rate, Slabbert’s project can only be seen as constructive: his works are not exploitative images recorded by a tourist thrilled by the exotic otherworldliness of the natives, but sincere attempts at dialogue with a world his upbringing had sought to keep removed from him.
His simple aim is “to share a positive energy” with people on the streets of a part of town where most others normally just fly through thinking “Shit, I hope the lights are green.” And even though this act undeniably raises ideological issues that the cynic and the sophist could feast upon, at least he’s not scratching his chin and bemoaning the impossibility of it all, but out there doing it.
Lance Slabbert’s photographs, together with those of legendary downtown photographer Bobby Bobson and Edinburgh photo-artist Suzanne Ramensthaler, are on display at the NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, until September 28