Review of Alistair Whitton for ARTSA

Herewith:

Roger Ballen

I went to the launch of a series of Roger Ballen photographs from a series called 'Shadow Chamber'.

After the launch there was a talk by Roger Ballen who is possibly the biggest fucking idiot on the planet. He talked in kid's terms about his photographs taken in a boarding house and not once mentioned the ethical questions which the photography raises.

I can be for a simple photo/cash exchange when the photographer acknowledges that and takes some sort of ethical responsibility for it, and the subject is made aware of the possible implications of the photography.

Not Ballen who acts dumb.

Here is the opening remark on Roger Ballen's www.

The art of Roger Ballen is impossible to forget. It goes deep. Gets at places we didn’t know were there. Maybe hoped weren't there. It makes us wild. It opens us up to those uncertain, shocking and frighteningly banal aspects of the waking dream, twitching between animal and human, the clean and the unclean, the animate and the inanimate, the lived and the imagined, the natural and the performed. So despite the fact that his early and mid-period works – stretching, say, from the late 1970s through to the 1990s - were made under the guise of the photo-documentary tradition, there was always something else going on, something much sharper, much hotter. Arguably, the dynamic is this: Ballen’s complex artistic vision transforms particular historical and social issues into private, felt, internally experienced matters.

Later in the week I photographed my bed and discovered that the film, which was a gift, was heavily soiled with Fungus.

A review I wrote of a Goldblatt show at the Michael Stevenson.

http://www.artsouthafrica.com/?article=433

When David Goldblatt published In Boksburg in 1982, no one knew what the hell he was doing. In the face of rampant apartheid he withdrew to a quiet suburb and made black and white photographs, which declaimed very little. The straightness of the Boksburg arrow, in retrospect, is dangerously clear. Therefore it is with trepidation that I pick some holes in his latest show whose inevitable programme is also to let loose some predictive arrows into South Africa's middle distance.

The show is split into four sections, circulating clockwise from the entrance of the gallery, and titled Municipal Officials, In the time of Aids, Landscapes and Memorials. Because this review is too brief to evaluate four disparate sections, I have grouped the last three, which are distinct from the first.

To the left of Elize Klaaste, a municipal official in Loeriesfontein with a tidying disability, is a dilapidated bar heater. On the heater, in spider koki, is scribbled the warning, "Gevaar Buite Werking". On Elize's left, mounted on the wall behind her shoulder-pad, is a framed tourist advertisement featuring two non-descript scenes each containing a mesa. The caption reads: "The Northwest, come and see for yourself".

The clarity of Goldblatt's vision is more apparent in Municipal Officials than in the rest of the gallery, his argument more sustained. He has photographed municipal officials in situ. It is astonishing to see the ease with which technical mastery, the addressing of taboo areas of transitional dysfunction (in a nuanced and unbiased way), and the trials of trying to keep an office tidy collapse into each other.

Klaaste's faulty heater and the atypical tourist photographs hint at two problems the exhibition addresses: the failure of systems and how difficult it is to photograph the semi-desert successfully. All the work is sewn together by a foreboding sense of impending or existent failure, but in order to posit an argument which is based predominantly on photographs whose meaning is designed not to be ostensible, there needs to be a strictness of vision and the cumulative force of quantity. These only exist in Municipal Officials, which is both humorous and careful.

The ensuing three sections are comprised mainly of landscapes, all of them indexed by traces of man. They are barren and filled with apocalyptic ennui. In the time of Aids depicts landscapes, each containing an Aids ribbon of sorts. There are very few people in these landscapes; it is as if everyone has died. Memorials are pictures of small, roadside memorials, and Landscapes is chiefly a mix of photos made at intersections of longitude and latitude and semi-desert vistas, sometimes containing person or two.

In these three sections, with a few notable exceptions (such as In commemoration of and protest against farm murders, Rietvlei on the N1, near Polokwane, Limpopo. 19 June 2004), Goldblatt has often photographed ideas rather than pictures, finding scenes that are illustrative rather than sublime. The gritty printing technique, a slightly raised perspective and the fact that just about everything has been photographed at high sun lend to some very ordinary scenes a photographic value that is not innate to them. While this might be the point I miss, I think it is those scenes bolstered, not saved, by technique that succeed best.

Being au fait with Goldblatt's work means that I can place this show on a telling trajectory between its antecedents, and where he might be headed. For those who don't know his work it might, however, seem like an unresolved project. It is a pity that the accompanying texts do little to explain the work into a context because it needs a thorough, binding preface.

David William Southwood is a photographer based between Cape Town and Berlin

Milnerton site

The Milnerton site is nearly live. It's modelled on the Google.com image search and has a spooky ghosting effect when the thumbs are moused over.

Kyle Morland programmed it.

I change it all the time because it's in my nature.

Gou gou! Tjoep tjoep! Nou nou! Milnerton Hoovers

In the middle part of my career I suffered the crisis of conscience which all photographers in Africa with half a brain(and a conscience) suffer. The making of portraits seemed like the taking of lives to me, so I began, like the Bechers, to photograph objects in a serial fashion.

The Milnerton Market suffered at the hands of my new occupation and hoovers, particularly, took a knock.

At the same time I read a text in an academic journal which was about 'duplification' in the Afrikaans language. Repetition of a word like 'gou' indicates a certain peremptory quality, like 'don't do that thing now, do it right now!'

I thought that their domestic quality, and the repetition of the hoovers would be well suited to the text. The academic was less easy to persuade.

The author remarked that he had heard someone on a cookery show use the phrase, 'Nou nou nou'

Reportage Atri Festival catalogue 2010

My catalogue arrived kind courtesy of Federica Angelucci, photo curator at the Michael Stevenson gallery in Cape Town.

Unfortunately it's written in Italian so I can't comment on what the organisers and curators say.

My handbag photos open the section which lists the participants in the SA show which is called, 'After A'.

Dan Graham's 'Homes for America'

I have been obsessed with this project of Graham's for ages. Essentially bare, it's a series of photographs of tract housing in the U.S. circa '69. Why would someone not from Germany embark on a serious bit of architecture photography couched in laconicism?

Graham didn't want to take photos of architecture for the buildings' sake. He was more concerned with offering a switch between the two then dominant forms of art making: minimalism and pop.

Quoting from what he found before him was a nod in the direction of pop, and minimalism, which was concerned with 'the cultural infrastructure of design', rears it's cuboid white head in the artlessness and serialisation of the architecture's appearance in the series.

Those qualities are cool and clever, but what's really fucking top is the relationship which Graham implies between photography and modern art through what he photographs, how he photographs it and where the photos appeared in their most influential form(in magazines). I think that Paul Graham realised that when changing contexts photos changed their nature entirely. This was unclear to the rest of his peers I think.

I too have a tarpaulin shot

It's no secret that iconic images re-enter the imagination, both popular and individual, with alarming alacrity and stealth.

Here is my second version of Robert Frank's famous original'Covered Car, Long Beach, California'

It's from the Milnerton Market.

The first was from a strange town in Korea.



Quote from the linked www: 'In a general sense, these comparisons are meant to remind us that the true shape of influence is one composed of feeling as well as conscious recognition, and, more particularly, to suggest that Frank found in Evans’ work not only a guide to what he might photograph in America, but a vision of how he might understand what he saw here.'

Durban Refinery

Here is another shot from the tilt/shift project. It's of the Oil Refinery near the old official Durban airport. It stinks, but is photogenic.

Ey! There is no rifle in Ching Chong Cha...

Not my picture

Honey, please come down from the attic-it's been 20 yrs

A petroleum company have commissioned me to make some photographs of the interests they have in heavy industry and urban infrastructure.

They asked me to photograph various landscapes using the 'tilt/shift' effect. What this easy-to-do effect does is throw various parts of the scene into blur. It's been done millions of times before and will be done again, but it never ceases to look uncanny.

Scenes look like miniature models.

It's a gimmick in a sense, but I was thinking that this may be what most architects when they are faced with the world. It's easy to gloss over complex problems when the inhabitants of the scene are objectified and become gnomes with no feelings, or workers.

Venice Biennale of Architecture

http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html

I have been asked by Noero Wolff, a firm of architects, to produce a film about 3 schools which they built, or added to, recently. The schools are in Cape Town.

The only other moving picture which I have ever made(and can mention in the public realm) was called Jokes from Old Folks and appeared in Video Room of the National gallery in Cape Town.

This second stab at film/video is a touch more serious than the first.

Here are some stills from the project.

Cobus Best.

An extract from a letter to a friend:

I interviewed a car guard at Milnerton(MKT) today called Cobus. He had had his nose bitten by a boerbull and his surname is Best. He is George Best's cousin, he says. I wasn't sure about the relationship with the British hero until be told me that the dog owners gave him some box wine as a compensation for the nip. He said he poured some Martell(are you counting the nips?) into the box wine and slotted it before he had crossed the street...

What a good guy.

the etched hound

I resurrected my Olympus Mju, climbed Cape Town's Mount Olympus, snapped her(Cressida) with Ilford film, came home, processed it in my bathroom and posted it on Facebook...wow

Canny inverse

The canny part of the way in which this uncanny agglomeration(see post below) of objects presents itself is in the red of the pool table's felt: it's the precise inverse of perfect pool table green in the additive colour model.

When I saw this scene I thought of my delirious, drunken days at the University Club pool table I felt blue.

Cairo

I was invited to speak at a conference, on African Urbanism, in Cairo.

Amongst the heavies were Abdoumaliq Simone(urban theorist) and Filip de Boeck(anthropologist).

I presented my thoughts on some ethical problems associated with photographing strangers in a city, and a method of photographing cities which gives a sense of the way in which people move through urban space.

After the conference finished I walked Cairo...

The woman with her kid lives in an area called the 'City of the Dead'

I know her name, but I don't know how to spell it. Once I have a good translation I will post it.

Enjin Magazine.

Thank you Enjin Magazine.

http://www.reportageatrifestival.it/it/

Federica Angelucci of the Michael Stevenson Gallery has invited me to be a part of the show mentioned at the URL above.

It opens in mid-June, runs for 2 months and is held in Abruzzo, Italy.

The 'Handbags' have been included. Seven works, each at 70 cm in diameter, printed on uncoated paper and mounted on circular aluminum discs.

It's an interesting inclusion under the problematic banner of 'documentary', but I guess it will stand out amongst straighter forms of documentary photography.

The titles specify the name of the bag owner, the colour(from a pack of paint swatches) which the owner chose as the background and the date on which the photograph was made.

eg. Simone, Lush Bog, 5.12.2009

The Big Banana Bet

I was recently privy to a wager($25 000). The question on which the bet was founded was... it possible to reconstitute a peeled banana in less than 10 seconds?

In order to prove that this is possible I devised a mechanism to capture very fast motion.

Here are the results.

I am not the first person to use fancy photography to get rich. The first photographer to do it was Eadweard Muybridge.

His work was about small parts of hard-to-see actions. The narrative structure of his work was dissimilar(and strangely post-modern) to the banana series. The relationship between scenes in Muybridge's work is dissolved and each frame has its own distinct dramaturgy. In the BBB there is a distinct succession of productive actions leading to a happy finale which is justified by my friend Kilian's expressive succession.

ICON MAGAZINE spreads

Wicked. Here are the spreads.

Ponte, and Cape Town.

ICON MAGAZINE

The famous design rag from London asked me to photograph the city and include the controversial stadium. There they are, arranged neatly for das Camera.

I needed some sense of scale in the middle ground, so when an unsuspecting dog walker cruised past I gave her the large-format crash course.

'When I whistle depress this stalk, ok?'
'Ok'

Don't believe the hype. Large format is a piece of piss.

My dog is there as well. Looking back at the camera, returning the 'mechanised gaze' of the big boner camera which is shafting the entire city bowl.

Cressida is a woman dog so everything will be fine.

Ponte Tower

Since I began to take heed of SA photographic culture, and what the newspapers detailed, I have been aware of Ponte Towers. The dark column has a long been used as a speaker through which to tell of Johannesburg's ills.

I was commissioned by Das Magazine to work there for 3 days.

It's been sanitised and is a pretty pleasant place in which to work if you do not mind heights.

The towers have been photographed as nauseam and are a cliche nowadays. I am much happier with the portraits I made, than I am with the structural work.

...and this.

I am on it. What does this mean?

The press release and the work in question:

1. 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective

Opens 15 April until mid-September

This large exhibition, which occupies the entire Gallery, showcases the history and diversity of modern and contemporary South African art from the time of the formation of the Union of South Africa a century ago to the present.

The exhibition covers the period when modern South African art started to articulate itself in relation to the rest of the world. The selection, primarily from the Iziko South African National Gallery permanent collection is supplemented by works on loan from other public and corporate collections around the country. Audiences can look forward to modern gems and rare treasures by Gerard Sekoto, Irma Stern, George Pemba, Maggie Laubser, Gerard Bhengu, JH Pierneef, Durant Sihlali and Dumile Feni. The exhibition acknowledges important developments in local art history such as Polly Street, Rorke’s Drift, DRUM magazine,
Resistance Art, and the rise of South Africa’s energetic contemporary art scene.

A rare overview of South African art. Don’t miss it!