Michket Krifa and Laura Serani, who curated the Borders photography exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, certainly chose a metaphorically rich theme.
The photographers present an array of images that jointly convey a resoundingly African portrait of borders — places of division and intersection.
The exhibition presents a distilled selection of work from the 2009 Bamako Encounters, Mali’s famous African Photography Biennale. The show features the work of 40 photographers and 13 video artists and it commands the whole downstairs section of the Johannesburg Gallery.
Many of the photographs share a contiguous stretch of wall space — each photographer’s project has adequate breathing space and appears as a cohesive unit. Indeed, it is testament to the refined individual style of the photographers that one is rarely confused about where one photographer’s work ends and another’s begins.
Thematic connections were also forged — for example, the work of Ananias Leki Dago (Côte d’Ivoire) was neatly juxtaposed with that of Antony Kaminju (Kenya), since both consider how South African townships resonate in the African imagination.
Much of the work is highly creative and uses the mechanics of the camera as an extra voice in the language of the image. Abdoulaye Barry (Chad) followed a group of street urchins in N’Djamena, whose glazed eyes look out blankly from behind their glue packets. Barry’s images often seem haphazard and deliberately unfocused — a poignant photographic expression of the desultory lives of the children themselves.
Lilia Benzid (Tunisia) photographed tombstones at the Zaafrane cemetery. They were covered (presumably by family and friends of the deceased) with clothing and accessories — jackets, necklaces, hats and so on — and appear quite human. Benzid photographed the tombstones individually, thus they figure as a highly unusual series of “portraits”.
I was curious to see how the work of South Africans in particular fared when compared with the cohort from the continent. I was pleased to observe that the local contributions are of a consistently high standard.
I was most visually attracted to Graeme Williams’s The Edge of Town, a complex and colourful collection, the fruit of four years of photographic work in towns and townships across South Africa. Williams’s pieces require lengthy study — each image is, in some sense, an amalgamation of images, incorporating what he calls a “discordant accumulation of elements”.
He appears to draw out the discord between the real and the fake, mapping the promises of the new South Africa and the reality of persisting poverty and inequality. This discord is captured in a particularly striking image from Thabong township, which shows a black woman sweeping a dusty street, while the foreground is dominated by an image of a buxom blonde printed on a beach towel blowing in the wind.
In a similar vein is a photo taken at Edunusa township, which also uses this pictures-within-pictures device. Here our gaze is initially drawn to a billboard of two attractive models in a well-lit studio, before we look closer to see that the billboard is stuck to the side of a shanty house (perhaps to cover a hole), while a modest frock (nothing as glamorous as the attire of the models in the billboard) hangs on a wire washing line.
Williams’s work captures the vibrancy of contemporary South Africa, while noting that this is one layer among others, many of which are deeply Stygian.
A similarly impressive South African contribution comes from Jodi Bieber, whose Going Home series concerns the confrontations between illegal immigrants and the mechanisms of the law.
Her striking monochrome prints reveal the discomfort and shame of those immigrants transported by train for repatriation. Bieber captures the acute sense of displacement — of a people separated from home — with great sensitivity.
She also offers a novel outlook on illegal immigration, as we are often invited to see the immigrants through the lens of the law enforcement agencies tasked with policing them.
I admit to being surprised at the absence of some photographers in this collection. I had expected to see, for example, some of the work from Pieter Hugo’s Messina/Musina series. Hugo’s critically acclaimed work documents the lives of those at the town of Musina, at the border of Limpopo and Zimbabwe.
Similarly well placed would have been the work of Bang Bang Club member Greg Marinovich. His recent work, Fence Jumpers, examines the trauma of Zimbabweans crossing the South African border and also looks at those tasked to ensure that the fence jumpers do not succeed.
Hugo’s and Marinovich’s work would have been right on point for this exhibition. It is inspired and technically excellent and, most importantly, it confronts the issues of borders with a sophistication lacking in the work of other photographers shown here.
Nonetheless, the exhibition is, in most respects, a great success: The wide range of excellent (and excellently presented) work is unusual for an exhibition this large.
Also, we are frequently presented with statistics and headlines about immigration in Africa; this exhibition provides an engaging visual articulation of this.
The Borders exhibition will be at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until September 26