In Gugulethu in 2006 Scandinavian photographer Per Englund paid a youngster R10 to smile for his camera and the resulting image is of an African mouth, revealing a golden tooth.
There is silken brown skin, a lack of facial hair suggesting that this may be a boy or a woman and, towards the left of a gentle smile, in a row of white teeth, there is the golden item that earned the subject a pittance and a place in a book about township style. According to the caption this was the only person Englund paid to pose.
Englund’s book is called The Beautiful Struggle (Dokument publishers), a title that gestures to the deeper meaning behind the somewhat superficial but colourful collection of photographs of everyday township life.
The idea that to make the most of poverty one needs to do something aesthetically pleasing with the little one has has been frequently explored. Yet when one engages with the clash of ‘traditional African and global youth cultures”, as the book’s blurb has it, one necessarily reflects on the endless capability of human creativity.
It is something we witnessed in Shack Chic, Craig Fraser’s much-maligned 2002 look at ‘the good taste of slum-dwellers”, as one critic put it. As an outsider, the Colgate smiles, the vibrant colours of township walls, the obviously cheap yet fashionable brand rip-offs placate an inner worry that the saying, paraphrased as ‘gold can make anything ugly look beautiful but poverty is just hideous”, may be true.
The book is the result of two trips documentary and fashion photographer Englund made to Cape Town: one in 2002 and a return in 2006 that lasted 15 months. Here he teamed up with interpreter and guide Mlami Figlan for the journey of a lifetime. He visited daily township stopovers — hairdressing salons, butcheries and shebeens — and came up with a surprisingly fresh version of what we’ve seen before.
For foreign readers (the book is published in Sweden) Figlan situates the Cape township landscape and demystifies slang such as Ekasi, pantsula, coconut and kwaito.
Karen Waltorp Sorensen, a Danish anthropology student based in Cape Town, spoke to local Rastas and hip-hoppers and Englund wrote an insightful short piece about riding minibus taxis out of town. This is accompanied by a short photo-essay of windscreens with sticker-slogans like, ‘Please call me”, ‘Jesus never fails” and ‘No time for tears”.
In fact slogans tend to express the real anxieties of Cape township life. Graffiti reads ‘pain is love fuck fear drink beer” and a T-shirt reads ‘man of the past living in the present”.
As a work by a European fashion photographer The Beautiful Struggle is hardly a chronicle of design dos and don’ts. It would be odd if some white European kids decided to adopt an African township style and to reinvent themselves as Swedish pantsulas!
Rather, this is Englund’s edited tribute to the time he had in Africa. You can almost hear him bragging: ‘Been there, done that.” For thousands, however, there is no way out of shack land — they have no choice, and so they are still ‘doing that”.
The Beautiful Struggle is available through David Krut Publishing and Arts Resource. Visit www.davidkrutpublishing.com or Tel: 011 880 4242