Stepping outside their commercial work, eight fashion photographers took time out to play
Suzy Bell
Cow porn, egg-yolk innocence, Christian evangelism, silent landscapes, grotesque beauty and a three-legged dog … Fidelity is a thematically chaotic exhibition, but what else can you expect when a bunch of photographers are told to create whatever turns them on?
Bruno Zolezzi of Infidels, the Cape Town-based photographic agency that set the project in motion, says the title of the exhibition is simply a play on the name of the agency. The idea was to give his photographers more creative latitude than they usualy have on, say, a magazine shoot.
”I told them to do something off the wall, nothing commercial,” says Zolezzi. Fortunately he managed to convince Monex, the holding company of Century City shopping complex outisde Cape Town, to lend them a shop for free to use as an exhibition space. Some distance away from the world of struggling art galleries, this is an exhibition with a captive audience of shoppers in a massive, spectactulary kitsch shopping complex, displaying its images between the coffee shops and Italian shoes.
It’s interesting that this takes place in a commercial environment, because this is the work of commercial photographers stepping beyond the bounds of the work that usually pays their bills. Perhaps the sense of freedom went to their heads this is an extraordinarily diffuse show, with not much to hold it together besides the fact that these photographers usually make commercial work, and all have worked in fashion at some time.
Only Lance Slabbert, however, chooses to make a direct comment about fashion photography, tweaking his images so that they echo the conventions of fashion but go beyond the usual facile dedication to beauty. He takes the usual repository of attractiveness and, within that frame, risks ugliness.
The rest of the work ranges widely, both in subject matter and quality. Andrew Barker’s chapel-serene landscapes are ambiguous, sad and lonely, beautifully silent. Irek Kielczyk’s hopelessly mediocre images of a fair maiden spending a unimaginative day in the woods lack intrigue and emotion.
Crispian Plunkett, one of this country’s top fashion photographrs, splices different but similar images together, colour into black and white, creating a strange sense of double vision. Using professional models doing something other than making clothes look nice, his images are clean and stylised. Dangerously good-looking preachers embody his theme of baptism, lavishly styled by SL magazine’s fashion editor Justine Tasker.
Also heavily styled, this time by Derreck Mhlongo, the photos of Lance Slabbert take the traditional portrait and (using models, non-models and ”character models”) play around with conventional ideas of beauty. Familiar facial features melt and distort, echoing Picasso’s cubist fragmentation and the painterly deformity Francis Bacon so loved.
These images comment, too, on the way the fashion industry still marginalises those who do not fit its stringent concepts of beauty for example, it’s the mixed-race ”straight-nosed” British and American models who get to play the exotic African, while the genuine article is often ignored.
Jillian Lochner’s photographs come at the issue of beauty in quite another, and very startling, way. Her subjects of beauty are intimate portraits of blissfully happy cows, framed by swimming-pool blue skies and lush, mint-green grass. They’re called ”cow porn” because of their mountainous ”Dolly Parton tits”, says the photographer, and here are images with resonances that go way beyond aesthetic games.
Andy Warhol made cow wallpaper; Damien Hirst suspended cows and calves, carved in half, in formaldehyde. Cows are treated as breeding machines; they are edible, while also motherly providers of milk.
Lochner lures the viewer into her obsession, taking one from the carefree happy cows in the green, green field to more sombre close-ups ”cow foetus (mother slaughtered)”, we are informed.
Lochner spent countless sessions at the local abbatoir documenting the slaughter of cows. ”It was torturous. I had blood splattering all over me and as for some of the slaughtering methods they are barbaric. I was also horrified to discover they even slaughter pregnant cows.”
Lochner also dipped into the subject of dogs, and she has some sensitive and tender black-and-white portraits of a three-legged dog. Along with the ”cow porn”, these images have sparked the most interest from the passing shoppers of Century City.
Fidelity is on until March 24; Entrance 5, Century City
Head towards Paarl on the N1 from Cape Town city centre.