There's no such thing as "the greatest photographer in the world," but, if there were, it would be David Goldblatt.
Goldblatt is also something of a paradox. How is it that someone who has been honored so often by so many is still relatively unknown outside of his native South Africa?
Tomorrow night, Goldblatt will receive yet another well-earned accolade -- the International Center of Photography's prestigious Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement award. Photo District News asked me to mark the occasion by examining his long career and, along the way, explaining the paradox. You can read what I have to say, here.
But I still like it. I like it for the way that it shows ordinary people doing a wide variety of perfectly ordinary things. I like it because is shows happy people being kind to one another. I like it for its celebration of unsung heroes.
Sure, Coke romanticizes the everyday. (And the inclusion of the Peugeot pickup truck in the first video is pure nostalgia.) But Coke's Africa is also an Africa that works, an Africa that isn't on its knees begging for help. It's an Africa that represents the daily lives of the majority of its people much more closely than the tired old stereotypes that were invoked during, for instance, Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign. I'll bet that, as an ad campaign, it will be a huge success.
As far as I know, these ads won't be seen broadcast in the US or anywhere else outside of Africa. That's too bad. They would be part of a growing effort to give Americans and non-Africans generally a more complex and challenging vision of the continent. While the people behind, for instance, blogs like Another Africa and Everyday Africa, and websites such as The Other Africa, are out to confront stereotypes and misunderstandings, they would never deny that Africa has its problems. They would insist, however, Africa's story needs a multitude of voices and visions to tell it.
The effort to create a more honest understanding of Africa goes on at least as much within popular culture as it does in the classroom. It's there that Coke's campaign, for all of its contradictions, can play a positive role.
Alf Kumalo, one of the twentieth century's great photographers, died yesterday in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was 82.
The South Africa photojournalist and writer Greg Marinovich published a moving tribute, today. Here's an extract:
I last saw Alf a couple of months ago, and, as usual, he had his camera with him. He was dressed up for an on-camera interview, and looked fabulous. I had only my mobile phone with me, and as I tut-tutted, peering at the back of my phone screen at the unsatisfying images, Alf offered to let me use the camera that he always carried, no matter where he went.
It was vintage Kumalo: polite, unassuming, gentle, generous.
This was a guy who had done it all, from hanging out with Muhammad Ali while shooting Rumble in the Jungle (before turning down an offer to be Ali's personal photographer) to capturing Oliver Tambo ringside at a boxing match and then later at his treason trial in 1954.
He was particularly close to Nelson Mandela. He became Mandela's de facto official photographer when Nelson was in jail, chronicling the lives of his wife Winnie and the children Madiba could not watch grow up. "There were very few people with cameras but thank God we captured many events that have recorded the history of both the struggle and the peace and democracy," said Bra Alf.
I also found a couple of short films about Kumalo. In the first, photographers who worked with him and learned from him talk about him with affection and deep respect. In the second, he speaks for himself. They're both wonderful.
I've written before about South Africa's rich photographic history.
Taking the size of the population into account, few countries have been
blessed with so many good -- even great -- photographers. Nowhere on earth has
photography mattered more. Kumalo was one the the best and most important of them all.
My photography has always been rather quiet. It's probably become a lot more quiet and, I hope, deeper.
--Cedric Nunn, September 2012
* * *
Sometimes the most powerful photographs whisper. They invite us into their world and make us want to linger. They move us deeply without seeming to try. We want to take them in slowly -- looking, thinking, feeling. Images that refuse to shout can seem out of step with our culture of tweets and likes, buzz and blogs, but they're often the photos that we end up liking the best. I suspect it's also the photography that will endure.
Cedric Nunn has been a name to be reckoned with ever since the 1980s, when he was a member of the Afrapix collective, making some of the most iconic photographs of the South African freedom struggle. That's when I became aware of him. But it's only in the last few years that I've begun to appreciate the depth and complexity of his body of work.
I'm not the only one to finally catch on. Call and Response, a major retrospective, has been on view at David Krut Projects, New York, since last week. The opening reception is on Wednesday, September 12th, from 6 to 8. Do yourself a favor and stop by for a look.
Cedric Nunn: From the series Blood Relatives.
"Blood Relatives" is the series that pulled me into Nunn's photography. When we talked about it last week, he described it as a way of exploring what it means to be a mixed-race South African and "of getting to know my rather large extended family." During the apartheid era, mixed-race people (Nunn is uncomfortable with the more common term "Coloured," seeing it an something imposed from the outside) found themselves existing uneasily between the politically dominant white minority and the large, restless African majority.
The end of apartheid was supposed to herald the dawn of a non-racial society, where people would be simply South African. It hasn't worked out that way. South Africans remain highly conscious of race. Mixed-race or Coloured is still an identity that needs explaining and exploring.
Cedric Nunn: From the series Blood Relatives.
Nunn began his work on mixed-race identity in Johannesburg, far from his birthplace in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Things didn't go well. As he puts it,
"I found the mixed-race people in Johannesburg were foreign to me. I felt I was photographing them as people that I knew so little about.... Culturally they were quite different... they were city people... And the Cape Town people were even more foreign to my experience of being mixed race. I saw that the photos that I'd done of my own family were a lot more coherent and that's what lead me to focus on my family.
Cedric Nunn: From the series Blood Relatives.
Nunn's photos in "Blood Relatives" don't provide any easy answers, for himself or for viewers. Instead they invite reflection that is both personal and political, especially in the South African context. Although the project was initially directed at mixed-race people, it speaks to everyone.
Cedric Nunn: From the series Struggle.
Perhaps unusually for a photographer, Nunn "grew up in a family without a camera." But it was a family that was nevertheless devoted to photographs.
...my mom had a big suitcase jam-packed with photographs. Three or four times a year, we'd gather in her room, and she'd shift through all these photographs. It was a bit of a history lesson for us. We'd learn about the family, we'd learn about incidents in her life.
Nunn's father, who spent most of his working life managing stores for white owners, subscribed to Time-Life books, which were something of a lifeline for a poor child in the countryside. "Once a month," Nunn remembers, "these books would arrive -- these incredible journeys into foreign lands."
Cedric Nunn: From the series Struggle.
After he was forced to leave school at 16 and begin work in a sugar factory, Nunn subscribed to Time magazine, not because he was inspired by the photojournalism, but as an alternative to the government propaganda that he heard on the radio and too often read in the press. Time and the Time-Life books, however, prepared him for what came next.
Hanging out in Durban, in the late 1970s, Nunn met Peter McKenzie, a photography student who was only a couple of years older.
The catalyst, and it really was that, was when I went to his humble little garden cottage that he was renting with his wife and his kids, and I saw his portfolio and those images... I was completely blown over by that experience and I recognized that this was in fact what I wanted to do.
Cedric Nunn: From the series Struggle.
Nunn's friendship with McKenzie led him to Omar Badsha, one of founders of Afrapix and among South Africa's best known photographers. "That was my education -- Omar Badsha. Not in any overt way. He gave me the space to grow."
Nunn joined Afrapix, in the early 1980s, after travelling through Europe. ("That was another aspect of my education to go and locate myself in Europe in relative freedom. To breath the air and explore.") Even as a member of the collective, producing what became known as "struggle photography," Nunn refused to shout. In the right hands, poetry is as powerful as a policeman's truncheon.
Cedric Nunn: From the series Cuito Cuanavale.
The struggle photographers were, in effect, war photographers. Nunn says, "we saw people dying constantly. ...We were all subjected to an incredible array of emotions and disorientation as a result of that."
Part of the healing for Nunn was to work on "Cuito Cuanavale," a project that involved photographing the site of one of the most significant battles in the external wars that apartheid South Africa fought in its attempt to keep white supremacy alive in southern Africa. South Africa's retreat, in the face of the overwhelming strength of the Angolan military and its Cuban allies, was a turning point in the freedom struggle. As the new, democratic South Africa's ambassador to Cuba said in 2005, "the blood of Cuban martyrs... runs deep in the African soil and nurtures the tree of freedom in our country."
I spend a lot of time wishing I were in South Africa. Yes, I know: Be Here Now. Screw it. I'll take South Africa, preferably Cape Town.
Except for today. Right now -- 5 September 2012 -- I'd rather be in Johannesburg for the opening of Nadine Hutton's first solo show, I, Joburg, at Room, 70 Juta Street, Braamfontein.
I, Joburg, exhibition catalogue.
I find it difficult to write about Nadine's work without gushing, on the one hand, and tripping over overwrought metaphors, on the other. So let me put it very simply. Her photography, film-making, and truly innovative use of social media add up to one of the most emotionally and intellectually challenging bodies of work that I've seen in years.
One of the things that I like the most about the work is the way it subverts, ignores, tramples on, and strokes the poor tired head of distinctions that have long seemed crucial to thinking about photography and film, especially the supposed dichotomies of documentary and art, public and private, personal and political.
I, Joburg catalogue. [Click on any image to see a larger version.]
The works on view in I, Joburg are just fragments of Nadine's output. But having seen the catalogue and the short film, "Memoirs of a Killarney Houseboy," that is a part of the show, I think it reflects some of the subject matter and much of the sensibility that she's developed in the course of her still relatively brief career.
In this show, the subjects are her city and her friends and collaborators. The sensibility, in the words of Maria Fidel Regueros, is "direct, quiet... schizophrenic and queer."
I, Joburg catalogue.
I take the show's title to mean two things. First, Johannesburg is Nadine's city. It's where she grew up and where she first worked in photography as a photojournalist, documenting its life in a more or less straightforward manner. In this show, however, she's created menacing documents (to paraphrase Regueros) -- photos that look like set designs for a movie version of Lauren Beukes' brilliant dystopian novel Zoo City. The photos are at once documents and art.
I, Joburg catalogue.
Second, I, Joburg refers to the camera that Nadine used to make the show's photo -- an iPhone. The use of the iPhone is more than incidental. Its small size, unobtrusiveness, and the fact that most people don't take it seriously facilitated Nadine's move from observer to participant, from a more distanced relationship to what is in front of her lens to a more intimate one. Public and private merge, separate, and come together once more.
I, Joburg catalogue.
In these photos and in "Memoirs of a Killarney Houseboy," the personal is the political. Their depictions of "spirituality, melancholy... absurdity, silence, friends and lovers, aspirations" are central to what Regueros calls Nadine's "ongoing disruption of benign heteronormativity." Queerness here is a sensibility, an identity, a way of being in the world; it's expressed with a matter-of-factness that destabilizes heterosexual norms more effectively than any overt display of sexuality ever could.
I, Joburg catalogue.
I, Joburg will be on view from September 5th to the 29th. Nadine leads an artist's walkabout on Saturday, September 22nd, at 11:00. Go, if you possibly can.
If you can't, check out Nadine's photography on her website, here, and her videos on both Vimeo and YouTube.
I mentioned that social media is a central part of Nadine's art. To get a sense of what she's up to, follow her on tumblr and Twitter.
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