Photographer Paul Alberts’s retrospective consists of 199 photographs taken over 30 years
Matthew Burbidge
‘I’ll leave the happy pictures in my album of my family,” says photographer Paul Alberts of his exhibition, Retrospective 1970 to 2000, opening in Johannesburg next week.
It is a brooding, sombre collection but then Alberts, like American photographer Diane Arbus, doesn’t shy away from the scars.
“They’re not happy pictures,” Alberts says, “South Africa is a distrustful society … society is separated and there’s an inborn racism in all of us that’s part and parcel of life here. It’s about being aware I have difficulty sleeping at night if I have to think of the suffering and unhappiness even a kilometre from my house.”
Speaking of his dark vision, he mentions that he attended the Dutch Reformed Church as a child: “One was not supposed to feel happy.”
Alberts has an enormous, infectious energy. Within five minutes of meeting him at his cavernous home the renovated Brandfort hotel in the Free State where he lives with his wife and children he is poring over a car collector’s magazine, loudly compiling his wish list. This energy drives him to go after the subjects he wants to record, and anything else that interests him like buying and renovating a neglected Boer War concentration camp outside the town.
“I’m an optimist. It’s deeply rooted in my whole being … but at the same time, you know life is not easy. I’m one of those who don’t believe in hell I think it’s here on Earth and, Christ, it can’t be worse than it is here. I’ve just tried to depict some things I’ve seen or experienced and most of these things have been negative. I’m drawn to the sadder parts of life.”
All the works on this exhibition are “old school” big black-and-white prints. This format allows him to “get to the heart of the matter” in true social documentary style. “There is a challenge in black-and-white like in the Transkei, there are rolling green hills, blue sky and then the poverty. Somehow not to deride colour social documentary photography, which is incredibly difficult it detracts from what is really there.”
He also prints his photographs full-frame, which means there is no cropping in the darkroom. The picture is printed as it was taken.
For the show, Alberts has chosen 199 photographs, taken over the past 30 years, from an initial edit of 600 images. The majority of the pictures on show depict people a mass of the ordinary, the famous or soon-to-be famous, sometimes the soon-to-be-dead.
One of the most striking of his portraits is that of painter Jean Welz, taken just days before his death. When Alberts snapped the picture, Welz had just risen from what was to be his deathbed to find a painting Alberts had come to photograph, then had slumped on a couch.
The intensity and humanity of the Welz portrait is echoed in the other pictures. There is a strange and terrible photograph of Afrikaans poet Sheila Cussons, peering out of the shadows in her study at home in Barcelona in 1977 no longer the beauty who threatened the marriages of the leading literati of her day.
There’s also a sad series of John Vorster a noted press-hater during his last days in office in June 1979. Alberts was the only photographer there as the man went through the motions, tipping his hat and waving on the steps of Groote Schuur to a non-existent crowd. The charade had been organised so a camera crew could record his last days as president. In Alberts’s pictures, the hollowness of the moment is revealed.
In constrast to these, there are brighter images such as that of a plump and preened Wilbur Smith in a wicker chair in his garden in 1975. There is a young and striking Mimi Coertze performing in Tosca in 1975, a slim Pieter-Dirk Uys (with hair!) from the same year and a brooding Eugene Terre’Blanche at the height of his power in 1986.
All his subjects seem comfortable before Alberts’s camera. They trust him and he works fast to capture “the moment”.
“It suddenly strikes the subject that you are a mirror and that they are being photographed. Now they must think, ‘I am being recorded, and this man is doing the recording. The moment is created by the subject I’m a participant.
“Call it fortunate, call it skilful, lucky in fact you can call it whatever you want. It can become very intense. I can understand how even a sexual thing can develop, but it’s never happened to me. People allow you into their binnekamer and there’s the issue of trust. Some photographers don’t give a damn and are only interested in their shot I’m not one of those.
“If someone I didn’t know came into my house and asked to take my picture, I would send him to hell. Yet, when I am in less-privileged people’s houses, they are overawed it is a privilege to take their picture.”
Alberts also still believes in the power of photography to effect change and has started work on an inspired aid programme, called Reafana (South Sotho for “we give gladly”). It aims to distribute food and aid to older people in rural areas, and through them, to hungry children. The plan struck him as he heard the shocking stories of rape and abuse of the elderly at an inquiry into the abuse, neglect and ill-treatment of older persons last year. “I heard their stories and I knew, this is what I am going to spend the rest of my life doing.”
Alberts may have seen hell on Earth through his photographs; now he is doing something about it other than snapping its picture.
Paul Alberts’s Retrospective opens at the Bensusan Museum of Photography in the MuseuMAfrica on February 11 at 3pm. Tel: (011) 883?5624