The final image of Dave Southwood’s recently published photo book, ÂMilnerton Market, is a grainy black-and-white image of a small boy, Jasper, walking towards the camera carrying a model of a schooner in his hands.
The model is almost as big as his torso; it looks like a pirate ship. There is evidence that it has recently rained but the sun is battling through the clouds, the light illuminating the tarred surface, the shadows and reflections of passers-by falling long into the foreground.
This image seems an appropriate end to the 10 years this book charts. Southwood began documenting the goings-on at Milnerton Market in 1999 and since then has become a surrogate member of this community.
Ranging across different photographic processes, from 35mm to medium and large format, the images track the life of the market: from the people manning their stands to the objects in the stands themselves.
In this way the thread the book traces is not so much about a group of people, but has more to do with the sphere of trade that brings them to this barren tract of land outside Cape Town.
Southwood’s images serve to illuminate the renewed lives of objects that find new purpose in the market while giving a face to their owners — now only ephemeral custodians as they potentially pass to new owners.
Lapsed commodification
In the everyday quality of these images of decrepit power tools, kitchen utensils, home accessories, furniture, books and other seemingly useless objects there emerges something sublime. In the zone between the goods and their traders an entire world of lapsed commodification is opened up that resists the capitalist disposition of buying “new” goods.
In this way the book, in a Marxist turn, examines “the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production”.
What emerges, then, is the face of a consumptive ethic that sits on the borders of trade, perpetually recycling itself.
The book also resists the usual Âdesignation of a regular anthology of photographs and operates rather as a kind of user manual for the market, a guide ordering the chaos, moving the viewer through the intimacies of Southwood’s experiences. This is seen in the layout of the book, which breaks with the regular convention of a single image per page.
Starting with the first image Southwood took at the market — of two innocuous ceramic birds, one with a broken wing — with the date stamp in red at the bottom right-hand corner indicating 17 10 ’99, the images flit back and forth in time from things and landscapes to people, with various combinations in between.
Text is also present in the book as a contextualising mechanism, Âserving to break the selection down into a series of chapters. These bracketing devices tell particular stories, Âweaving different narratives among this assemblage of chaos.
There is no shortage of gravitas in the writing.
From short-story big hitter Ivan Vladislavic and photographic historian Michael Godby to veteran journalist Ivor Powell, the insights of these parallel texts increase the intellectual tone of the book.
Without these framing devices, the photographs would appear as a loose arrangement of disparate points Âwithout any fixed locus.
This is because the layout of the photographs leaves something to be desired. There is too much white space on the pages on which images are doubled up — the images are almost too small to be enjoyed properly.
Carefully conceived
The design also seems to be at odds with itself: at once found object and academic tome. The picture layout suggests a type of homemade photo album, but the printing and binding attest to an otherwise carefully conceived document, albeit trapped in its own milieu.
Although the book stands together with the market, it also observes from outside. It does not fetishise as much as it lingers; like the casual market-goer it peruses the objects and glances at the traders with an air of sustained inquisitiveness.
The very nature of the photographic enterprise wants to suggest a detachment leaning on the side of empirical objectivity. But this particular anthology openly traverses the subjective line of experience. In this series the viewer feels as if he is following Southwood’s eye during a trip around the market: the portraits reopen the vestiges of conversations and the objects give life to these lost Âdialogues — they themselves are the origins of the market, after all.
Dave Southwood’s Milnerton Market is published by Fourthwall Books.