The Lines of Sight photographic exhibition has an extremely broad vision, but it manages to hit its target, writes Chris Roper
Given the budgetary constraints the South African National Gallery has to work under, deciding to hold an exhibition of the history of South African photography this century seems a foolhardy venture. This makes the hugely successful Lines of Sight show even more laudable.
I arrived to view it expecting, at most, one room of photographs, and those pretty much devoted to the usual idea of history. Photos of famous people, famous incidents and a bit of nostalgia – the choices forced on curators when they’re trying to juggle limited funds with the demands of politically correct representation.
What the visitor gets is five rooms filled with a rich, varied collection that documents, comments on and creates multitudinous views of South Africa. These are Lines of Sight that, as with all effective photography, work both ways: often you notice the image staring back at you, accusingly, seductively, or uncaringly.
There are seven components to the show, each with a different curator, and between them they make a brave effort to cover all aspects of photography. Kathleen Grundlingh’s Pictorialism and the salon in South Africa, 1906-1960, is the first section you encounter, and it’s fascinating. My favourite photo of the show is here – an undated, untitled picture by HI Wilmot. It shows an old car coming down a gravel road that winds through some soft hills crouched under a louring sky. You can read the whole history of early South African landscape painting in this photo. It looks as if the photographer has tried to impose a universalised European aesthetic on an African landscape, and it’s an uneasy grafting. Despite the soft-focus hills and the Romantic sky, the lonely road reasserts an essential geographical wildness that stamps the picture as strange and alienating.
The car, which Grundlingh suggests might have been added to the road in the darkroom, looks lost and lonely, rather than an example of technological dominance. You can see – or at least imagine – the way a certain type of gaze is struggling to make a foreign landscape fit into a familiar way of seeing.This is a useful model to take with you as you tour the show, as it highlights the constructed nature of photographs, as well as the insidious attraction of nostalgia. Many of the other photos are beautiful, and although you might find some of them excessively colonial – Bensusan’s 1952 photo of a hut entitled Somebody’s Home, for example – you’ll appreciate their aesthetic qualities.
Nostalgia is an easy drug to succumb to in the next section, Emile Maurice’s Lives of Colour: Images from Cape Photo-Albums, which “honours the life experiences and memories of people who were formerly classified as `coloured'”. This consists of postcards and snaps – ordinary lives documented in all their uniqueness, and it’s an intensely interesting project. The postcards are ones that servicemen in World War II had made to send home. The juxtaposition of the soldiers’ faces with their treasured photos of loved ones, both superimposed on a shot of touristy landscapes like the pyramids in Egypt, creates a dynamic and moving feeling of mortality and loneliness. I could have done without the curator’s propensity for spattering every caption with exclamation marks. It makes reading them something akin to being yapped at by a barker at a fair.
(Re) Sites: History, Land and Power, curated by Geoffrey Grundlingh, “looks back on 20th century South Africa through a selection of only 10 photographs. Each image is a reference to a significant event, which impacted on the unfolding struggle for possession of the land which has characterised this time”. Choosing one photo to sum up a decade, especially given the incredibly complex patterns of power that have played themselves out in South Africa, is an extreme metonym for the unenviable act of curatorship, but the results are intriguing. For example, 1940 is represented by a photo of Women queuing at the Women’s Polling Booth, Vasco (photographer unknown), and the oddity of a “women only” line (white women, obviously) highlights a form of oppression that can often be subsumed in the larger political picture. The 1950s offering, Eli Weinberg’s Pass-burning campaign, speaks of another type of struggle, but in the close up of hands, feet, pass books and flames, you can find a resonance with the faces of the women voters. It’s not always an easy resonance, a fact that is brought home by the 1990s offering, Doug Pithey’s famous Voters queuing in Khayelitsha, with its aerial view of a long snake of patient people waiting to take part in South Africa’s first democratic election.
This review is positive, because Lines of Sight is an excellent, and in many ways a pioneering exhibition, but some visitors will find ideological inconsistencies, offensive photographs and uncomfortable lacunae. The strength of the curators is that they are aware of these problems, most of which are inevitable consequences of the constraints of political circumstance or budget. Indeed, the exhibition sometimes appears to be designed to point out its own necessary shortcomings, as a way of criticising gaps in history that demand to be addressed in later projects.
So in her notes to Securing Shadows – the role of women in South African photography, Marilyn Martin writes that “the most telling absences in this component are black women. This situation echoes the history of South African art and serves as an urgent reminder that circumstances and opportunities need to be created to encourage and nurture black women photographers.” There are some stunning photographs in this section, of which Lien Botha’s Geskiedenisportret is probably emblematic. The confluence of paternalism and racism suggested by her sailor-suited white boy-child and strangely featureless black man, is one that is evident in many of the works.
Another section that will fruitfully fuel a debate around who gets to represent whom, is Michael Godby’s African Contrast, which shows contrasts in the representation of African people seen against the background of the migrant labour system and the economic geography of South Africa.
A more pointed commentary on censorship is Photographs Denied, curated by Cedric Nunn, which “aims to open up to debate photographic images of subjects that might once have been taboo for one reason or another”. There are the expected recipients of political suppression, but also photos canned due to “taste” considerations, like Caroline Suzman’s evocative picture of a woman giving birth at home. Divergence, curated by Zwelethu Mthethwa, deals with “new work and new approaches to photography”, and is perhaps the logical place to look for an indication of the direction in which the curators expect South African photography to move. But the exhibition as a whole answers that question in its distillation of history as well as in the pointed care the curators have taken to frame Lines of Sight for a politically and visually literate contemporary South African audience.
A free guided tour of Lines of Sight will take place on Wednesday July 28