While Lolo Veleko’s proclivity for lucid colours has always engendered her work with a dreamlike quality, in Wonderland, her new collection of photographs, she finds whimsy in the muted bustle of everyday live.
Her pictures of people’s peculiar private spaces or quirky people in public spaces seem to induce a stillness not normally associated with urban life. While previously, her now world-famous street photographs of fashionable youngsters featured only Jo’burgers, this time Veleko casts the net wider, capturing fleeting utopian moments in decorated Cape Town bathrooms and in Durban public parks named after rape victims.
As usual, she draws heavily on previous themes but has tweaked her methods to add more scope to her ongoing exploration of identity. The 2008 Young Artist award winner for visual arts calls Wonderland — showing at this year’s National Arts Festival until June 29 — a “step further in investigating the social and emotional states of my surroundings”.
Wonderland seems to be thematically similar to your previous work and incorporates elements of your previous output. How is it “a step further in investigating the social and emotional states of my surroundings”?
I mainly work within my previous themes and look at contrasts within. Technically I adopted a medium-format camera, a Mamiya 645, which could give me better quality so as to print big. I also use a Horizon 120° camera and this way of working allows me to see wider and panoramic views too.
By going inside private spaces to document the environments within and to travel to places I do not live in, to work with language most times being a difficulty and to really explain oneself to the other person has been a challenge. Previously the work was produced in a studied environment.
Also, in the past there has not been much freedom with regards to the people I photographed from their side, whether it be a freedom of them hiding or revealing themselves to me, a stranger with a camera asking for a photograph. In Wonderland I allow this to happen.
What is Wonderland?
For me it’s been many things. It’s working with dreams, memory and yearning. It’s of things that are in between reality and the unreal, something that you think might be better but isn’t. It’s that tension and friction that you see in the images —
Also with Wonderland I went out of my comfort zone to work in different places such as KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town. The social and emotional states at the moment are not so clear in the whole world but, looking within, I also needed to have that come through the photographs I took.
The photos seem disparate. Can you talk about the selection process and how they fit in with the concept of Wonderland?
A lot of those images talk to one another. We’re not even trying to see them as groups, but if you look at the bigger picture, there are islands in the bigger picture that connect.
The work that you showed at Flow [at The Studio Museum in Harlem, United States] is from the same series as Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder?
But there’s a lot of different things I do as I photograph, like getting closer to the subject. The way some of those pictures were cropped, some are above the knees because I wanted to focus on the jewellery that the subjects were wearing, or a T-shirt or a hat. Different shows go with different things. In Snap Judgments it was mostly the full-on images.
Some of the images of street fashion shot in Durban are quite bland.
Some of this work is still in progress. I didn’t stay in Durban for long, probably for about three weeks. The work takes a long time to do because people might refuse to be photographed. Which means it might take two years or longer. In Jo’burg I had studied the surrounds and sifted through the crowds.
What are you working on after this?
I’m trying to develop the work on private spaces, with people I have worked with before or with new people. I’m also interested in continuing a project I started in England about office clothing, how people identify with it and how they put it on, whether it’s a simple hairstyle or a hair clip. I also took photos of young people in England who hang out in certain parts of the city. In Tokyo I took photos of the Harajuku [a district where young, fashionable Japanese women congregate]. Then, maybe later, I want to contrast the body of work by showing it together.