/ 25 July 2011

Going Southwood on the N1

A road trip is never just about the road itself; it is also about the story the road takes you on — and, as a medium, photography seems naturally suited to it.

As a catalogue of time, the tangential points of a trip are immortalised and assigned a significance, however minute, by the direction of the photographer’s lens.

Dave Southwood’s latest exhibition, N1, at the Goethe-Institut on Jan Smuts Avenue, is a good example. Using a trip on the N1 as a reason to take pictures that parallel the journey, Southwood investigates the surfaces and textures of the classic road trip.

The N1 begins at the northern end of Buitengracht Street in Cape Town, near the entrance to the Waterfront, and ends at the Beitbridge borderpost at the Limpopo River. It is one of the country’s main arterial routes, passing through five provinces. Therefore, one would expect landscape to be the predominant feature in such a show.

But Southwood’s desire for his pictures to “communicate as phenomena” in an almost “precognitive state” means that the nuances of everyday life are allowed to permeate the narrative of the exhibition strongly. Naturally, fuel stations feature but, in a testament to Southwood’s deliberate intention not to lock down an experience of the road and journey, they are not what you would expect. Rather, they are suggested as points and gestures along the lines of a narrative through subtle intimations such as colour and the lonely drift of people milling about outside a service stop.

The cracked porcelain of a hand washbasin in a dimly lit truck stop echoes the recurring, mundane experience that the show charts. But this tiny observation is juxtaposed with soaring, grand topographies. In an exquisitely printed image of a truck crossing a misty bridge, the tonal gradation of this all-but-invisible vapour allows the viewer to become lost in the transience of the experience.

A single signpost on a barren landscape against a blue sky reads “Love the Road Ahead”, whereas the horizontal red and yellow lines through a car window in another shot speak of a respite from that very road.

In this sense the exhibition takes us through a series of beginnings and ends, illuminating the distance in-between. Attesting to this are the titles of the works, which provide only the geographical co-ordinates of where each image was taken. In this way, viewers are left to make sense of each picture themselves, giving Southwood’s unique mode of storytelling a typically open end. As style itself becomes a narrative mechanism, colour enhances the visual experience. The bright pink of a jersey in the midday sun is blown out against a vivid azure sky.

What is more impressive is the range of photographic space and depth that the series investigates. In one of the few images of the actual N1, where the road narrows to single lanes as it passes through a jagged cutting, the detail in the shadows is fully visible.

Here the technical ability of rendering a flash-lit subject becomes a central concern of the work, giving the landscape an illuminating presence.

Considering the current petrol crisis in the country, this exhibition makes visible what is usually disregarded during the tedious routine of travel. The ordinariness of a broken windowpane and the decomposing carcass of a cow are celebrated as an arc on a journey that dares to look beyond and contemplate the banality of blinkered everyday vision. Southwood’s images sift through the roadside junk, looking for but not casting meaning.

Dave Southwood’s N1 is on at the Goethe-Institute, 119 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, Johannesburg, until August 26