ALEX DODD
“In the 1970s and 1980s South African photography
was largely dominated by the genre of social documentary,”
writes Kathleen Grundlingh of the South African National
Gallery (SANG) in Cape Town. Grundlingh was behind the
milestone 1997 exhibition PhotoSynthesis, which strove
to reflect the trends and discourses that characterise
creative South African photography in the late 1990s.
“Freed from their collective political purpose,
photographers have had to redefine their individual
photographic identities and aims.
“The 1990s have heralded the rebirth of a South
African photography which is rich in diversity. In post-apartheid
South Africa, photographers and artists are exploring
the potential of the medium as a vehicle for self-expression.”
PhotoSynthesis featured the works of innovative documentarists
like Guy Tillim, Andrew Tshabangu, Angie Buckland, Omar
Badsha and Santu Mofokeng, who takes the documentary
genre into unprecedented spaces and private worlds.
In a more conceptual vein were the works of Stephen
Hobbs, Jeremy Wafer, Jo Ractliffe, Minette Vari and
Tamsyn Adams. Then there was studio artist Bobby Bobson,
and, on the pop front, Godfrey Gumede (whose Warhol-goes-Africa
montage Born to Love U features a photograph of a woman
wearing a doek pasted on to the lens of a camera) and
Sipho Khosa, whose Icon combines Byzantine iconography
with a down-to-earth snapshot of a modern African woman.
At a more abstract symbolic level were the works of
Alastair Whitton, Lien Botha, Jane Alexander and Penny
Siopis.
“What is so striking about the submissions for
this exhibition,” writes the University of the
Western Cape’s Jane Taylor, “is just how many
of them are exploring formal properties such as design,
illusion, framing ... Andrew Tshabangu’s images
of women working with braziers is luminously metaphysical
in its tones, placing images within clusters of oval
Victorian frames, giving the images he produces a self-conscious
archaism and thereby invoking conventional landscape
effects. Zwelethu Mthethwa’s recent photographic
portraits seem to belong to the vividly coloured language
of his drawings, and as a result the photographs treat
the domestic environments of the women he photographs
as tone poems saturated with colour and graphic interest.”
Despite the curators’ earnest attempts at fair
representation, many significant photographers still
felt excluded from the process. Nonetheless the exhibition
fulfilled its aim of showing how photography has shifted
from the zealous realism that predated the new South
Africa.
Form is being taken as seriously as content. Writes
Mofokeng: “The ‘us and them’ paradigm
that informed my photographic practice in the past has
given way to an awkward ‘we’‚ a foetus
of doubtful pedigree.”
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