When Cape Town-based photographer and graphic designer Mimi Cherono Ng’ok arrived in Johannesburg on May 25 to prepare for her first solo photographic exhibition, the country was still in shock from the xenophobic attacks that would leave more than 40 000 people displaced countrywide.
Making the frequent journey from Primrose on the East Rand to the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, the Kenyan-born artist was struck by the general absence of African immigrants from the streets of downtown Johannesburg compared with Cape Town, where the attacks happened mostly on the outskirts of the city.
Her exhibition, entitled I Am Home, uses about 25 black-and-white portraits shot between last October and April this year to deconstruct what it means to be black, but not South African, in post-apartheid South Africa.
Given one’s take on the subject, the timing of the exhibition in light of the recent violence could either be fortunate or quite the opposite.
On one hand it runs the risk of being viewed as the artist’s response to the attacks, while on the other it arrives as a timely counter-balance to the predominant media images of immigrants.
So while there are no photographs of men peering from behind the bars at Lindela, Ng’ok’s subjects come from various countries on the continent and diverse walks of life and some reflect her own privileged circumstances. ‘It’s different when you come here as a student as opposed to when you come here to work,” she says. ‘As a student you are quite sheltered and you have access to a community.”
All her protagonists were photographed in Cape Town, her base since 2003 when she arrived from Kenya to study photography at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. A few are artists she met at Chimurenga magazine’s home base, the pan-African Market, during her two-year stint as an intern and researcher at the publication. One is her capoeira instructor while the others are acquaintances, friends or parents of friends.
As the title boldly states, the photographs work as an exploration of the fluid idea of home and how that is usually up to the individual to construct. ‘Home for me was initially where my family was,” says the 24-year-old Ng’ok, whose family lives in Kenya. ‘Now I feel South Africa’s my home because it’s the place where I’ve grown up a lot, that has allowed me to become something I aspired to be [a photographer] and become comfortable enough to fulfil my potential.”
When Ng’ok began the project as part of the Market Photo Workshop’s Edward Ruiz Mentorship programme, she was shooting with a 35mm camera. Under the guidance of her mentor, photographer Jean Brundrit, she switched to the medium format Mamiya RZ67 for purposes of experimentation, a ‘more intimidating” camera which, she says, forced her to work more efficiently.
Brundrit refers to her protégé as a ‘prolific photographer” and described the editing process as painstaking, which is to say Ng’ok was still developing her vision through photography.
Shot using a tripod and extensively edited, the selected images are full of an understated defiance, rendered by the formality of the process, the positioning of the camera below eye-level but, more importantly, by the unusualness of the images within a South African context. Ng’ok’s aversion to discernable backgrounds and her preference for individuals or pairs rules out the need for safety by numbers.
The exception to this rule is a group photo of Angolan men, whom the artist says were together to make funeral arrangements when they were photographed. She says Portuguese-speaking immigrants tend to group together as they find it harder to assimilate because of the language barrier. Where the backdrops are explicitly depicted or at least alluded to, they seem to suggest affluence, or at the very least comfort.
In person the artist comes across studious and tentative and, similarly, the images that were less formulaic are those where a clear rapport with the subjects is apparent. An example is a photo of an elderly man born in Zimbabwe, a friend’s father who has been in the country for more than 35 years. He recently suffered a stroke, subsequent to the photograph being taken. His playful, charming pose, with his head tiltled and spectacles perched on a shirt button, now stands as a stark reminder of the idyll he enjoyed before he suffered his stroke. But, if nothing more, the picture serves to crush the myth that migration to this country is a post-1994 phenomenon.
Mimi Cherono Ng’ok’s exhibition, I Am Home, runs at the Market Photo Workshop, 2 President Street, Newtown until August 6. Tel: 011 834 1444