Photography is the focus in Cape Town this week.
For the past year Guy Tillim has been photographing the landscape in French Polynesia. The resulting exhibition, titled Second Nature is a meditation on the act of representation and the methods we use to study and fix the world around us. Part historical work that draws on the work of ‘landscape painters” who formed part of Captain James Cook’s voyages to the islands in the late 18th century, part aesthetic philosophy, it’s a subtle meditation, whose tone and oddly compelling vision are distinctly Tillim’s own.
Rather than isolating images and treating them as emblems of knowledge, he captures the landscape as something incomprehensible, inchoately wonderful, at once frozen in memory and always in perpetual motion. As Tillim tells it, ‘What is photographed? Nothing, and everything, when you have no desire to leave the frame.”
Opens July 27 from 6 to 8pm. Michael Stevenson Gallery, Ground floor, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town. Until September 3.
Browsing Facebook isn’t usually the way a exhibition gets commissioned, but that’s what happened to photographer Gary Van Wyk. Heidi Erdmann of Erdmann Contemporary and The Photographers Gallery saw one of the Cape Flats born lens-man’s photographs on Facebook and immediately booked a show. Erdmann isn’t Van Wyk’s only fan, about 350 people swamped the gallery for the opening of his exhibition, Private Public earlier this month. So what’s Van Wyk’s appeal? An ex-photo-journalist, he has an uncanny ability to capture the decisive moment. For Private Public he selected 24 images from his personal archive, all of which delight in the intimations of anonymity and intimacy, and in the complicated zones that demarcate divisions between what is public and what is private (both in art and life).
Photographers Gallery ZA & Erdmann Contemporary, 63 Shortmarket Street, Cape Town. Until August 2.