[DEBATE] : CCS to continue Mckenzie photo exhibit of migrant workers

[Patrick Bond]

Peter Mckenzie's brilliant photo exhibition of migrant workers to SA - 
sponsored by the Southern African Migration Project - will be continued 
on the Centre for Civil Society hallway through June, in the Memorial 
Tower Building's first floor F section (in the back of the courtyard).

For those cannot join us in person, they can be viewed here: 
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,40,3,1407

Born in Durban and the author of a forthcoming book on Wentworth, 
Mckenzie was a co-founder of the photo collective Afrapix agency under 
the auspices of the South African Council of Churches and the chief 
photographer for Drum Magazine until the late eighties before going 
free-lance. He was also the co-ordinator and facilitator of the 
photojournalism department at the Institute for the Advancement of 
Journalism from 1996 to 1999. Mckenzie has published and exhibited both 
locally and internationally, and is recognised as one of South Africa's 
greatest photographers.


Pre-Post: A Trajectory in South African Photography
By Peter Mckenzie, Sean O’ Toole and Jo Ractliffe

Sean: Very often in discussions of contemporary South African
photography, and I would say I’m a guilty culprit here too, commentators
have tended to speak of the 1990s signalling a break in continuity.
After decades of socially committed photography, Drum magazine in the
1950s and early 1960s, and more pointedly the socially committed vision
of the Afrapix collective in the 1980s, it seems that after Mandela’s
release and the transition to a non-racial democracy photography
splintered. At least so goes the master narrative. Or will history,
which is good at flattening things, simply define the 1990s as the
identity decade?

Jo: I remember in the mid 1990s there was much debate about the ‘crisis
in photography’, that with the advent of democracy, photographers ‘lost’
their subject. But I think it was more intricate than that and something
that faced all visual artists at the time, not only photographers.
Certainly, our world opened up – and not only politically. We began to
think differently about ourselves, our past and how it had been
narrated. There was a new complexity to image making; an investigation
into other themes, modes and languages, as well as more self-reflexivity
in the work of that time, all of which previously had not seemed
possible – and this links to your point about the 1990s being the
“identity decade”. Also, prior to democracy and particularly during the
1980s, there was a strong sense of ‘collectivity’ in the way artists and
photographers positioned themselves and how they worked; the imperatives
were clear-cut and unambiguous – as was the language of image making.
And photography was the domain of social documentary. There was little
ambivalence about this; it was a ‘weapon of the struggle’ and its
business was advocacy – exposing the evils of apartheid.

And there were other new things in the 1990s. We became part of an
international art world and this expanded the field; remember the 1995
and 1997 Johannesburg Biennales and the surge of photography and video
that followed? Suddenly, or so it seemed, photography had entered the
realm of art. I think that moment had quite a profound affect on
photography here and sometimes I wonder whether the splintering you
speak of wasn’t perhaps more an anxiety that photography might lose its
coherence, the distinctiveness of its project and simply be absorbed
into the broader practice of contemporary art – because that’s really
what changed here then. If you consider photography during the apartheid
years, its efficacy and its power was largely tied up in its deliverance
of an unequivocal and (seemingly) unmediated ‘truth’; we could ‘rely’ on
the image and we understood our world as much in terms of the
conventions of social documentary - its explicit black and white clarity
- as we did through its subjects.

Peter: I think to say that after 1994 photography ‘splintered’ is to
imply that there was some kind of cohesiveness in what photographers
were doing and saying during the apartheid years. I’m thinking more of
the 1970s and 1980s here. At the one extreme there were those, mostly
white photographers, who were at apartheid’s technical colleges,
universities, art schools, alongside those who were members of the
almost exclusively white Professional Photographers of South Africa
organisation unaffected or unconcerned about the issues of the day. On
the other hand, the socially engaged, ‘committed’ photographers,
professionals and free-lancers were a fairly disparate lot too. There
were the shooters like the Bang-Bang Club, locals working for the
‘wires’ and the South African media, the Drum photographers and those
working in progressive structures like Afrapix and others. The result
was a very diverse picture or photograph of the country as these
photographers brought their own aims, objectives and professional
imperatives to the situation, some ardently in search of the Pulitzer
winning photo of the man or woman with the burning tire around their
necks. Consequently, there were to consumers of these images both
locally and internationally, confusing truths about the realties of the
struggle for democracy and freedom. The photographs were mostly
sensational, voyeuristic and dehumanising and soon after its inception
Afrapix made a conscious decision to show the more humane side of
struggle, the resilience of revolution and the dignity of organisation
and resistance.

Jo: I think the subject, given all these factors, was not as clearly
defined as we would like to think and that the complexity of photographs
made during this period has not been fully explored. But maybe the
notion of subject during that time and now links these two eras. That
after the exploratory 1990s, the ‘identity decade’ or parade, we are
today being challenged by similar issues as those in our past and to
comment and reflect on them in new, effective and accessible ways.
Besides identity, the 1990s was also a period where photography delved
into the fabric of society in more detail and nuance than was allowed in
the past when physical access was difficult both due to angry and
frustrated communities and a security apparatus that was suspicious of
anyone with a camera. The work of the 1990s was also portrayed in much
more personal ways examining post-apartheid phenomena like truth and
reconciliation, diversity, rainbow-nationalism, post apartheid trauma
and the transformation project. Obviously these newfound themes or
subjects called for new visual languages, perspectives and conceptual
approaches.

Sean: Perhaps to expand on the previous question, histories of South
African photography often tend to highlight the social and political
content at the expense, I would argue, of a wider picture. Perhaps this
is unavoidable, and one that is justified given our history. But, and
here is my argument, the history of South African photography is about
more than social and political pictures. Early on in his career David
Goldblatt made fashion pictures for Tatler, in the 1980s he was making
portraits for Leadership magazine. Point being, there have always been a
number of ‘other’ photographies happening in tandem with image making
concerned with social and political contexts. Billy Monk, Paratus, Scope
magazine, South African photo comics, studio and street portraiture, for
example.

Jo: I’m reminded of something Susan Sontag said about photography in
South Africa when she visited here a few years ago. Her observation was
that photography is highly politicised here, in complex ways and not
simply in terms of a political subject, but in how the subject is
politicised. I would agree; our framing of things, the way we represent
things – even the representation – is politicised. So when thinking
about photography that has been ‘more than’ the socio-political, I’m not
entirely sure a ‘wider picture’ wouldn’t still be connected. Because
‘political’ doesn’t necessarily entail advocacy, photographers whose
work engaged with the ‘state of things’, but was circulated in other
contexts, outside of the press and other progressive media, could still
be considered political. And even if you take this further, to work
where the intention was not socio-political commentary, the political is
still embedded in our reception, the way we understand how things mean.

But to get back to ‘other photographies’, we should be clear about what
we’re looking at – you mention Scope magazine! And how could Paratus, a
military publication, not be political? But regarding David, I think
there’s a difference between work that defines a photographer’s practice
and work that earns a living. And while David’s Tatler work may be
illuminating in retrospect, it’s not the stuff of his career. Leadership
too, although many of those portraits have weight beyond their ‘bread
and butter’ origins, but I suspect they would still be seen as political
pictures, or at least in that register. Billy Monk is a better example
but there we only have the works, we know little about the motives
behind their making. One could argue there’s nothing overtly ‘political’
in them, but they do reflect a particular South African subculture, at a
particular time in our history and it is precisely because of that, what
they add to the ‘wider picture’, that they take on socio-political
connotations. That’s partly the thing about photographs; their meaning
is not fixed, nor is it located inherently within them. They reflect
different things over time and as their contexts shift and other
interests are brought to bear upon them, they mean new things. There are
other examples, private images, that acquire political resonance as they
find their way into the public archive – think of the studio portraits
in Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album, the snapshot of Brett Murray as a
boy, covered in boot polish and dressed up as a Zulu warrior, or the
home movie clips in Penny Siopis’ My Lovely Day. The point I’m making is
that things are charged here; our positioning and the things we make
figure in political terms, whether so intended or not.

Peter: The ‘wider picture’ or ‘other photographies’ was not an option
for some photographers, the crop was tight. Even the ‘bread and butter’
jobs that were done were gleaned from the progressive organisations that
had the budgets to pay for photographs. And resources like equipment and
film were scarce, every roll had to matter.

At the 1982 Culture and Resistance Festival in Gaberone, which convened
to examine themes of ‘Art for Social Development’ and ‘Culture as a
Weapon’, the role of photography was further compromised. We went to the 
festival as photographers and returned as cultural workers with a 
directive that the struggle for liberation demanded action beyond just
photography. Consequently photographers became involved in other facets
of the struggle; community mobilisation, advocacy, protest meetings,
funeral organisers, underground couriers and sometimes were detained for
their efforts. In retrospect this was positive in many ways, not least
because we were a bit arrogant about the importance of our role as those
who decided what the face of struggle looked like, that we were doing
work that had the same degree of persuasiveness as Sam Nzima’s
photograph of the mortally wounded Hector Peterson. So being a worker
brought some sobering perspective. Yes, I’m sure there were ‘other
photographies’, done even by the most committed, but their significance
was lost in the pursuit of more pressing imperatives.

Post- apartheid photography strove to escape from the confining
realities of the past. It was as if photographers, like all South
Africans, wanted to distance themselves as quickly as possible from the
‘fist in the air’ type image. Collective strategies were replaced by the
individual and the novelty of self. The irony was that much of the
stronger work being done in the 1990s was by those who belonged to the
social documentary traditions of the past. It was as if those
photographers were now freed up explore subjects, insights and
perspectives that they had self- censored in the past. The shift being
that it was now possible to explore life, to know it, to record the
fabric of current experience and invest it with meaning.

So it’s this type of continuity that I think is important today, this
newness and keen observation of the ordinary, the head and the heart in
a harmonious duet. Some contemporary South African photography has run
ahead of itself, not stopping to assess its effectiveness, clarity of
vision and relationship with the realities that face the country.

Jo: Sean, I think Peter’s comment about “more pressing imperatives”
addresses why certain practices were overlooked. But to throw something
else in here, I don’t think this was simply about political relevance.
Because why has Drum endured so in our imagination? It’s not just that
it reflected its time and pioneered the work of black photographers.
It’s equally because its photography was distinctive. So when
considering ‘other photographies’, the question remains, how would these
figure? For instance, your examples of Scope, Paratus and photo-comics;
are they compelling in photographic terms, or is their value as
artefact, what they reflect of South African culture?

Sean: Peter, two questions based on your response. It is well known that
at the 1982 Culture and Resistance Festival in Gaberone yourself and
David Goldblatt had a disagreement over the very issue of, as you put
it, “action beyond just photography”. Can you revisit this moment and
its significance? Secondly, and opening things up to Jo here, you talk
the post-apartheid moment freeing you (photographers collectively) to
“explore subjects, insights and perspectives that they had self-
censored in the past”. Can you talk a bit about this self-censorship? My
question here is partly informed by something JM Coetzee noted in a
review of Mona de Beer’s photo book, A Vision of the Past: “Is it enough
to reproduce an era’s representation of itself without at the very least
indicating the boundaries the era drew around that self-representation –
without, in other words, indicating what was censored from the public
image?”

Peter: I really don’t remember the detail of my disagreement with David
and I’m surprised that it’s well known, so I won’t comment, save to say
that photographers weren’t immune to the tensions between black and
white people and it took a long time, white or black, to establish one’s
bona fides, to be seen to be different from the press pack and to
identify with the struggle. So we shot our fists into the air when the
Amandlas rang out and downed cameras to toyi-toyi afterwards. I think
more than a consciously determined self-censorship, it was about being
subject and sensitive to the disposition of the times and acting in
sympathy, according to your convictions.

Jo: I think my circumstances were unlike Peter’s; I didn’t feel the same
pressures or restrictions that ‘professional activist’ photographers
would have, although my activities and the work I was making were seen
as political. But I didn’t ‘fit’ social documentary. Partly, it was how
I worked photographically - images that engaged with the constructs of
photography and the real as much as they did the subject. And that
separated me from many other photographers (then I was called an artist;
it’s only recently, I’ve noticed, that people are calling me a
photographer). But it did give me more autonomy. Looking back, the
personal has always been embedded in my work even if it wasn’t brought
to the fore as such. So regarding self-censorship, while I certainly
felt the need for my work to be socially and politically engaged, to
have ‘relevance’ beyond the personal, it was as much an internal
compulsion as it might have been an external obligation.

Sean: Picking up on something Jo said about pre-1994 photography, the
belief that surrounded its “deliverance of an unequivocal and
(seemingly) unmediated ‘truth’”; is it not possible that SA photography
is still burdened by this assumption? I raise this specifically in
relation to the numerous travelling group shows, in which photography is
reduced (not always) to a sort of picture postcard view from elsewhere –
the emphasis is still on visible depiction of otherness. (One could
argue that Snap Judgments, for example, fulfilled as well as wonderfully
debunked this demand of the West to see ‘how it is over there’.) I am
also interested to gauge from both of you how input from foreign
observers has influenced your thinking around South African photography.
After all, both of you are well travelled and now partake in a global
discourse of photography.

Peter: Maybe, as a friend suggested to me, the ‘truth’ that motivated
apartheid photography has today become subjective ‘truths’, like the
ruling party’s rhetoric of “A better life for all”. So if we’re clear
that these days our photography comes from a place of honesty then the
question could be what motivates our ideas or the conceptual framework
from which we create? If it’s personal or introspective, it raises the
question about where the impetus or genesis of the concept lies or
originates. The sources of ideas for creative output in South Africa are
as diverse as the variety of lived experiences in this enigmatic
country. But more important is the confluence of conviction about the
role or place of art today and how the profound affect of our recent
traumatic history influences this process. Visually we live with the
past. The landscapes, both physical and social, are daily reminders of
the challenges facing us. The things that touch and move us on an
everyday basis cannot be ignored and attempts to do this merely diminish
the effect of our work to the point that it seems to be coming from
another place, an attempt to extricate ourselves from our realities and
pander to the demands of the gallery and criteria that are informed by
sometimes questionable agendas.

This utopian idea of creativity free of responsibility falters in the
face of the social ills that slam us in the face whenever we see kids
sniffing glue at traffic lights alongside anxious baby-toting mothers.
Do scenarios like this not affect who we are, what we do and how we
create? Once you’ve seen it can you ‘unsee’ it? Sometimes it seems that
artists have bought into the government rhetoric of success and smugness
about South Africa, that we are free to pursue our individual and mostly
selfish notions of where conceptual thought comes from, free from
morality, accountability and the vision of what an equitable society
could and should be. We’ve succumbed to the powers that determine what
art is, mainly because they have decided what ‘sells’ and shunned a
sense of purpose because it doesn’t.

Jo: We were very invested in the idea of photographic ‘truth’ during
apartheid. Given the structural violence of the system, it’s secrecy and
lies, photography had to convey a clear, direct message, one that wasn’t
further complicated or undermined by questions about representation and
the subject. And as much as we may still be invested in what Susan
Sontag called the ‘concerns of ‘concerned’ photography’, I think there’s
a very different inflection to the work made now. But the link you make
between the ‘burden of truth’ and otherness is interesting. It seems we
still have quite a strong sense of being different, collectively, as a
nation – a sense of our own specialness. This may have something to do
with years of isolation, but we’re quite resistant to views from the
outside; we’re very particular about how we are represented, how we
explain ourselves for the world and the image of South Africa that’s
created. I wouldn’t equate this with the obligations of apartheid
photography though, but it may suggest a censure of another kind. I take
your point about the “postcard view from elsewhere” but I think we might
also collude in this to some degree; we resist what the prefix ‘South
African’ implies, but we also insist on our distinctiveness, which in
turn, could be seen to entrench our position of otherness, whatever the
curators’ interests may be. But I wouldn’t put Snap Judgments into your
“picture postcard” category. What struck me about that exhibition was
precisely the opposite; it’s actually quite hard to find ‘Africa’ in
that show, certainly if you’re looking something that would reflect
anything of the myth or stereotype. What did emerge, for me at least, is
the impossibility of defining ‘Africa’ in either photographic or other
terms.

My own experience in the international arena has been a somewhat
contradictory one. For most of the 1990s (especially with those early
survey shows), the general response to my work was that it lacked a
‘uniquely South African’ trait, while at the same time being ‘too South
African’, too specific in the framing of things, to relate in a global
context, which was interesting, if not a little frustrating at times.
But it did indicate something of what was desirable in terms of ‘South
African’ for a foreign audience then and the irony is that recently
there’s been international interest in many of those earlier works. I
think our interface with the international art world has ultimately been
beneficial; apart from the obvious opportunities of exhibitions,
exchanges and debates, it’s important to see how our work is received in
other contexts and it opens the space for a different set of relations,
to discover perhaps that we are less different than we might think.