When I arrive at Jo Ractliffe’s home nestled away in Bez Valley, she is getting a new cupboard installed.
Perhaps ‘new cupboard” isn’t really an appropriate description of the gargantuan piece of furniture that is slowly finding its way in pieces through the front door. It is an antique she picked up down the road that has been taken apart to fit through the front door. The thing is massive, stretching from wall to wall in her bedroom.
The bustle throughout the house gives me time to take in her space, to marvel at what she has on her walls and, more importantly, to investigate her music collection. An almost-kept secret is her self-made mixtapes music compilation, titled My Killer Country. The series stretches to volumes and has also inspired a book of the same title by her close friend, the author Mike Nicol.
With titles like Driving the Dark Heart and Love, Madness and Murder, these mixtapes are renowned for their mythical abilities to inspire and narrate the surreal and the macabre, albeit with a distinctive sense of humour. Photographer and friend Dave Southwood describes them as ‘Jo’s boozy calling cards. They are like a business card dipped in whisky and given to the wrong clients”.
Speaking of her love of music, Ractliffe recounts how once on a trip with veteran photographer David Goldblatt she put on Johnny Cash. The crooning dismayed Goldblatt, but he confided later that he was now listening to Cash while on the treadmill at the gym.
Goldblatt’s relationship with Ractliffe has been a significant part of her photographic career, one that she describes as an almost adversarial performance that they act out both in public and in private. They have travelled together and he has become a mentor.
Ractliffe says that, although their work might take different forms, their understanding of photography is aligned.
Speaking of this understanding, Ractliffe glances at the digital camera perched cumbersomely on the table in front of her, which belongs to Mail & Guardian photographer Lisa Skinner. ‘I would not even know what to do with that,” she says.
Sense of ghostliness
We stroll through the garden to her studio, where she shows me around her workspace, equipped with a darkroom. The beauty of her photographs lies hidden in their analogue quality, in the materiality of the print itself. When I remark about a favourite work, Microlite from the reShooting Diana series taken in the early Nineties, Ractliffe offers to show it to me again, from her portfolio printed by the late master printer Andrew Meintjes. The photograph is of the back of a woman’s head and shoulders and there is an indistinct image of a microlite above. It is remarkable for its tonal gradients of black and grey, for the sense of ghostliness it inspires.
Not wanting to get too close I admire the velvet textures at a safe distance. It’s just as well because Ractliffe tells me the picture’s surface can lift with the mere brush of a finger.
Back in the house, safely away from the clinical serenity of the studio, the colossal cupboard is safely installed.
The topic of conversation drifts away from photography and Ractliffe speculates about how she plans to fill her new addition. She points to a pile of shoeboxes waiting dutifully in the passage. ‘I love shoes,” she says, beaming. Glancing under the table at mine she pulls a face — ‘Dock-siders!” she says, laughing. ‘I prefer boots.”