One often wonders what the role of the artist and the photographer is today, working in a world saturated by visual information, bombarding us from every possible vantage point and via every medium. This overload relies heavily on the captured image to best convey the desired message, with directness and immediacy.
Most visual information is simply not intended to be contemplated, but purely acted upon, as we battle to keep up with our consumer-driven lives. This is possibly one of the causes of the gulf that exists between the creative artist, photographer and the public that often underestimate the true value of those who help us reflect on our world with the images they create.
When viewing the photographs of Jo Ractliffe one realises that it is not only what the photographer captures within the lens that is of significance, but also that which lies at the edges or just beyond the image which is worthy of contemplation.
Why did you choose photography over painting while studying at Ruth Prowse School of Fine Art?
It’s curious; I didn’t think I would be a photographer. At school I had a secret desire to be a writer. At Ruth Prowse photography wasn’t offered as a major so I did painting. And I remember trying to make paintings like Edward Hopper’s — desperate, bad paintings that my lecturer used to write over in charcoal. In my final year I bought my first camera, a Nikkormat. And it felt like someone had turned a light on.
Explain why you opted to choose subject matter that lay beyond the immediate surroundings of your home in Cape Town?
It had a lot to do with memory and association. Much of my childhood was spent in semi-rural and industrial spaces; my father managed a brickworks up the West Coast and we rode horses on the Cape Flats. So when I started photographing, I went back to places that had a resonance to my childhood, desert landscapes, abandoned factories and industrial wastelands.
What caused your work to take a new direction in the creation of the Nadir series from 1986 to 1988?
I became more interested in photography as an “experience” of the world, rather than photography as an “image” of the world. And my pictures didn’t seem to reflect that. So I began thinking about other ways of working, like montage, the idea of working with juxtaposition and narrative. But montage was a challenge for me, it went somewhat against the grain of what photography was about and my purist notions about the “integrity” of the image — “thou shalt not crop”. So I was a bit ambivalent about what I was trying to do, caught between my need for the real and my need to transform the image.
While creating the Nadir series, what remained more pivotal, the idea, or the image, as the series progressed?
Nadir began with an experiment in montage — and I owe a lot to Pippa Skotnes who was working along similar lines at this time. Initially I worked with reconfiguring various elements, inserting things from one image into another. Later I started making up completely fictitious landscapes, collaging bits and pieces from a range of images to produce a new space.
I had a vague thematic notion about landscape, ideas about “innocence” and taintedness, which later I developed in relation to apocalyptic writings. And I hadn’t really thought of dogs yet, although funnily enough, they were always around, getting themselves into my pictures.
But sometime in early 1987, while photographing at a resettlement camp in Port Nolloth, I saw a pack of dogs hounding a bitch on heat and I followed them. There was also a photograph I had taken in Crossroads in 1986, a white dog slinking around a pile of rubbish.
Did Nadir also act as a vehicle for your reaction to the dire socio-political climate prevalent at this time during the states of emergency declared in 1985?
Absolutely, but at the same time I didn’t want to work overtly in the language of resistance art, so prevalent during this period, one that was quite didactic, a direct form of public address. I didn’t fit that or that kind of photography. I wanted to find something that was more open-ended, metaphorical. And the notion of a ravaged landscape had a certain pertinence for me, it’s a theme that is central to the Nadir images. When I photographed the resettlement camp in Port Nolloth, where a whole township had just been wiped out — it made me think of JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. That sense of apocalyptic dread that might not necessarily be named as South Africa, but yet is so emblematic of the time.
How did Shooting Diana come into being? Why did it take five years before your next exhibition and what motivated the beginnings of photographing with a toy camera?
For a while after Nadir I felt a bit stuck creatively. The theft of all my photographic equipment in 1990 was the catalyst for a new language that broke from everything I had done up till that point. Financially, I wasn’t able to replace the equipment that had been stolen, so I began experimenting with some of the toy cameras I had collected. And a friend in America had just sent me the Diana to add to my collection. On one level, using a toy camera freed me; the low-tech aspect meant I could shoot quite intuitively without worrying about having to take light readings or using a tripod. Ironically, it wasn’t that simple; it demanded a number of other technical skills. I had to completely relearn seeing, something many photographers take for granted.
Shooting Diana allowed you great scope to photograph on the move, often from within a moving vehicle. This is an approach you continued to explore. Why has this interested you for almost a decade?
As a child I used to go to work with my father and I remember driving home in the dark, going past the refinery, going past the factories and coming back into Cape Town. And there was something very powerful about the way the grasses at the verge were picked up in the headlights — I could stare at that for hours. I think something of these moments is pivotal in understanding my desire to capture something of the fleeting indeterminancy of memory, but also, something of what I wanted from photography as a way of seeing.
And I love the notion of the road as the space between; between one life and the next, all things suspended, where you can “possess” the world. I suppose it also has something to do with a sense of outsiderness; being “on the road” as it were, allows you to feel at home in your unbelonging.
Your photograph of a dead donkey titled End of Time, is one of your most evocative and powerful images. Dead animals are a recurring theme in your work … are you able to explain your interest in this kind of subject matter?
Photographs are always about the desire to arrest something, suspending a moment in time. For me, this desire is really about guarding against loss. And loss and desire work together — you can’t really have one without the other. And it’s what I love about photography, that it is somewhat an impossible project. I would be dismayed if the photograph could actually arrest the moment. It is also the perfect stillness of death that fascinates me.
From a South African perspective there couldn’t be a better example of a facade of the ordinary than a place like Vlakplaas. Provide a little insight and background into the choice of subject for your work Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting).
This work was commissioned for Truth Veils, an exhibition that explored ideas around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
My first visit to Vlakplaas undid me. I had intended to make a video work, something quite forensic. I thought there would be enough material there to evoke the image “Vlakplaas” had activated in the public imagination. But when I got there, the Vlakplaas I was looking for was nowhere to be found — just an innocuous farmhouse, surrounded by a country landscape with flowering cosmos, next to the Hennops river. Nothing to indicate anything of the notorious workings of apartheid’s civil cooperation bureau [CCB]. So I had to come up with an idea for the work — how to produce something out of nothing. I decided to go back on June 2 1999, the day of the second democratic election, to use that day to mark something of the significance of Vlakplaas in relation to the shift to democracy.
What I think I found chilling wasn’t only the terrible history associated with this place, but the total banality of its facade. And it got me thinking about how I could represent a place so steeped in horror but without any material manifestation. So an important aspect of this work was about the failure of the photograph as a document of truth.
A retrospective of Jo Ractliffe’s work shows at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art in Johannesburg until July 31. For more information Tel: (011) 327 0000