From the 1980’s until the present there has
occurred a significant shift in the subject matter and style of the South
African photojournalism. The fluctuation of the political circumstance in
country, during and after Apartheid, undoubtedly played its part in this
transformation. However, one might wonder how much the photojournalist’s
personal incentive influenced his stylistic transformation. More importantly, what
consequences did these changes of style and subject matter have – not just for
the physical image, but more so for the institutional space in which it was
exposed as well as for the younger contemporary photographers? When the newspaper
became disinterested, the gallery became interested and what occurred was a
two-way compromise between photographer and institution.
Eric Miller joined Afrapix in 1980 and became
one of the first local photojournalist to document the struggle against Apartheid.
Miller, together with photojournalists such as Paul Weinberg, Guy Tillim and
David Goldblatt dedicated their careers to giving a voice to the victims of Apartheid
in international media. These photographers used their cameras as weapons to
fight against the Afrikaner Nationalist regime and to reveal the truth of what
really happened ‘beyond the barricades’. As Miller explains “...going
out there with my camera was a way of going to see for myself ... to see the truth”. Miller published
his work locally and internationally in news publications such as Time, New
York Times, The Weekly Mail and New Nation. He also became a
member of the news agency Reuters in 1988.
During the struggle Miller’s subject matter
consisted of protests, shoot-outs, police raids, necklacings, forced removals
and funerals - what in theory came to be known as ‘the aesthetic of flags
and fists’ of photographs from the Apartheid era. This ‘aesthetic’
was a crucial requirement for all photographs aimed at making hits in the originally
unresponsive, international news media. Images were explosive, action-packed
and fast-paced with blood, dead bodies and guns making a frequent appearance.
These photographs became the rescue material – the visual SOS signals informing
an entirely oblivious international audience. This is what Paul Weinberg termed
the ‘Then’ of photojournalism in the exhibition held at the Albany
Museum in Grahams Town in 2007 discussing the stylistic transformation of photojournalists
working in pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa. On 11 February 1990, the day
Nelson Mandela was released from prison, was when this ‘Then’ became the
‘Now’ in local photojournalism – when the photojournalist’s subject
matter crumbled together with Apartheid regime. Miller expresses what he
felt during this part of his career:
It was quite a challenge to transform myself from being a news
photographer ...to recording the slower, more human processes in the country.
In the following decade, Miller produced an
entirely different body of work omitted of the horror and violence of previous
years. This work rather concerned the more positive transformational processes
occurring in South Africa at the time. He directed his attention to topics such
as local health care and housing development, produced essays on subjects like
women’s boxing and sangoma culture and applied himself to more educational
purposes, writing articles and supplying photographs to publications like the
Rhodes Journalism Review.
In 2003 Miller published a book with
co-authors Görrel Espelund and
Jesper Strudsholm. For this project –
entitled Reality Bites – Miller travels the rest of Africa documenting
inspiring stories of individual Africans who have managed to advance in spectacular
ways. Aimed at reversing the view of the
miserable African stereotype, this project revealed the more hopeful Africa. Amputee
soccer in Sierra Leone; A children orphanage in Zambia and two ex-soldier
Sudanese youth are just a number of the themes covered in this book. In the post-Apartheid
years Miller thus abandons the ‘aesthetics of flags and fists’ from
previous years, allowing for his photographs to adapt a more humanistic
approach. These images are calmer, more sentimental and evident of a certain
nostalgia. Unlike Miller’s struggle photographs – with their dictating, fast-paced
messages - these images are permitted to resonate in the mind of the viewer as
they page through the hopeful narrative of Reality Bites.
Three changes thus comes to be revealed in
Miller’s later work: Firstly, his
subject matter has changed from politically motivated violence to humanistic
representations of social transformation.
Secondly - without the immediacy associated with the former news
photographs - the latter documentations were set in a less stressful working
environment in which Miller had time to negotiate with his subjects allowing
them to participate in the manner in which they are represented, as well as the
time to consider his preferred technical and visual settings – whether this is
composition, lighting, pose or background. And lastly, as consequence of the
resonating characteristic of these photographs, the viewer has been offered a
more respectful role in the ‘triangular relationship’ existing between subject,
photographer and audience, demanding for him or her to form their own analysis
of the image and accept its inherent ‘complexity
and contradiction’. Therefore
the viewer is given the chance to contemplate the image without being given immediate,
prescribed readings such is was the case in Miller’s earlier news photographs.
With this in mind one can view Miller’s
later – perhaps even more controversial – projects, with better understanding. Rebel
Chic was an exhibition held at ART Gallery in Cape Town in 2007 displaying
photographs Miller took of the Ugandan Resistance Army rebels. The photographs
take on the form of portraits. With their cocky poses, flashy sunglasses,
designer t-shirts and ammunition for props, the rebels seem to have played a
big role in the creation of their individual portraits. According to Art Times, Miller - by
negotiating an intimate relationship with the rebels in order to convince them
to pose for him – offers the gallery attendee ‘a peek into the curious rule
of the jungle’. The democratic approach Miller adapts towards his subjects
allows him to create a more humanistic portrayal of them, revealing to the
viewer the manner through which these men cope with the dangerous environment
they find themselves in.
Even though there evidently exists a stark
stylistic contrast between the ‘Then’ and the ‘Now’ stages of
Miller’s career, his commitment towards his subject has remained intact. Both
phases speak of his inclination to help create and serve a better society –
whether on political terms, such as was the case in his struggle photographs -
or on social terms revealing the aftermath and recovery of political struggle
and war - as is evident in his more contemporary work. Even though Miller’s
post-Apartheid photographs fail to reveal any deliberate political proclivity,
both collections are aimed at visually uplifting his subjects - always
representing them as ‘rightful human beings’.
One can now understand why art historian
Michael Godby so strongly opposes the assumption, that by migrating to the art
gallery, the South African photojournalist has deliberately sacrificed photographic
content for aesthetic values and as consequence has fallen into the trap of modernist
objectification of the subject. Instead, he argues, the same commitment
that fuelled their earlier work is still present in their contemporary, gallery-exhibited
photographs, but that they have now been forced to adapt new subject matter
that complies to a new institutional context.
Beauty – which has previously been regarded as opposed to any form of
meaning making – has now been adapted by photojournalists like Miller as
perhaps ‘the most eloquent vehicle they
have’ to articulate their ‘urgent’ social message. Therefore, instead of
compromising on content, Miller - by placing his works in a gallery – was able
to reinsert his visual message into public rhetoric. The current media is hung-up
with action. Social messages like
Miller’s do not reach the public eye through the media. Therefore alternative routes - even if
ethically perilous - had to be explored.
‘Committed art’ was the term used to describe
the photographic material that entered the gallery in the mid-1990’s – an art
that was neither centred around the photographer, nor the gallery itself, but
rather focussed on the human subject and the act of public engagement. It could
then be argued that, not only did Miller have to compromise in the form of
stylistic change, but the art gallery also had to compromise its rigid
principle of hosting purely modernist aesthetics. After 1990, South African
galleries are said to have become much more receptive of the medium of
photography, broadening its visual field from strictly fine art photography
such as the work of Jo Ractliffe and Penny Siopis, to include more works of the
newly introduced ‘committed art’.
The consequence of this stylistic and
institutional transformation on the work of the young contemporary photographer
is perhaps a somewhat blurred perspective of the practice itself. This is what
artist Jo Ractliffe calls the ‘maddeningly awkward space between otherness
and real, between art and documentary journalism’. Contemporary
photographer Dave Southwood adapts exactly this photographic persona through
his usage of a wide variety of styles and subject matter. Southwood shifts the
focus of his camera back and forth between documentary material and fine art,
sometimes even blending the two practices - similar to what was evident in
Miller’s more recent work Rebel Chic.
After ten years of documenting the Milnerton
Market, Southwood becomes an almost invisible presence on the scene. He
succeeds in creating an intimate relationship with market authorities, product
sellers and regular browsers, giving him access to the more intimate aspects of
this strange cultural environment. The collection consists of portraits, group
shots and still lives. His subjects participate in the project by designing
their own poses and even writing their own captions to the photographs. In this
way Southwood’s documentation – similar to that of Miller’s – adapts a
democratic relationship between himself and his subjects. These
photographs also serve as commentary on a certain local, cultural movement. It
could be defined as a ‘study’ of the behaviour, habits and physique of a certain
South African social ‘type’. With this in mind the photographs - aimed at being
published in the form of a coffee table book - adapt an almost ethnographic character.
Documentation and art – in their most vivid forms – merged together in
Southwood’s photographs to create a unique body of ‘committed art’.
Southwood also documents sex workers in
Swaziland, prisoner inmates at Pollsmoor and Valkenberg Mental Hospital
patients for publications like the New York based Colors magazine. Colors
is published in over 40 countries world-wide in four different languages. The
magazine is aimed at introducing equality of cultures to the world by
motivating discussion among young people of social themes that have been
overlooked by mainstream media. It makes use of photography as its main tool
for expressing these socially developmental ideals - regarding it as the most ‘expressive’
and ‘immediate’ medium to achieve its far reaching goal.
Southwood was also commissioned by social
development magazine The Big Issue to do a documentation on the movement
of supermarket trolleys in and around Cape Town. This project focuses on the
extent to which consumer culture blends into the realms of normal city life,
becoming an almost invisible extension of our everyday life. By following in the tracks of the these
trolleys, one is exposed to the varying and unbalanced social hierarchy of
South African culture. From consumer driven city centres to the commodity
deprived social peripheries, this culturally iconic object becomes a metaphor
of the fragility of our capitalist society. This project – while still a
documentation of social behaviour – adapts a more abstract character. It could
be argued that this project almost oversteps the verge of popular art, calling
to mind Andy Warhol’s 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket.
‘Nothing in Particular’ was a solo exhibition – presumably one of Southwood’s most popular
- held at the Bell-Roberts Art Gallery in 2002. For this exhibition Southwood
presented a collection of ‘richly coloured and finely articulated’
photographs of iconic South African locations such as the Durban beachfront and
the swimming pool at the Sea Point pavilion in Cape Town. At first the
collection of images seems insignificant - almost quotidian. The lack of commentary makes them seem even
more irrelevant to the gallery context. What Southwood achieves however is to
take his viewer on a – perhaps originally suspicious - trip down memory lane.
Standing in front of the image the viewer might experience either nostalgia,
sadness, claustrophobia or joyfulness depending on which memories these familiar
locations call to mind. Southwood forces the viewer to enter into a memory play
with the images, pushing him to confront ‘the conditions of his own
existence’. By showing the present Southwood persuades his viewer to confront
his past. One viewer remarked that the images reminded her of all the social
institutions that categorizes South African society.
The title and subject matter of Southwood’s
exhibition calls to mind some of David Goldblatt’s work, which Southwood
agrees, was one of his leading inspirations. Since 1990’s, Goldblatt – also an
ex-struggle photographer - has received great recognition from the art world
for his projects on the ideological constructions of South Africa. Goldblatt documented
South Africa’s political history by photographing its various architectural
structures. ‘Structures’, he argued ‘declare quite nakedly...what
manner of people built them, and what they (those people) stood for’.
Goldblatt, could be argued, to have been the forerunner of the phenomenon
experienced in the contemporary South African art world. He was the first to
blend architecture and documentary - the merger of art and documentary
journalism. Southwood’s work serves as proof of this statement. In his exhibition ‘Nothing in Particular’
Southwood strictly follows Goldblatt’s example: He allows his viewer to reflect
on and question the social conditions of his existence by exhibiting
photographs in a gallery of iconic South African locations. A documentation of
social circumstance through physical location. The perfect blend of
documentation and art.
In conclusion it could be argued that Eric
Miller and others alike, have - through their stylistic transformation – altered
the way we look at photojournalism. They created a doorway through which
documentary photography could enter the world of aesthetics. Photographers from
the 1980’s have initiated a two-way compromise between the art gallery and the
medium of documentary photography creating a unique style in South African photography
– one that is stylistically flexible. By retiring from an uninterested media world
and by adapting to certain aesthetic regulations, these photojournalists found
an alternative route for reaching public rhetoric. Photographers like Miller, Goldblatt and Guy Tillim
have thus paved the way for the contemporary photographer like Southwood, to
operate in an art world which is liberated from the extreme aesthetic divisions
of the past. The contemporary photographer is now allowed to roam freely in the
realms of the aesthetic world as ‘undercover’ mouthpieces for a healthier
society.