Gang Razor

See here for the work I did surrounding this nasty little fellow.

Bridge People

I have decided to photograph the bridge dwellers of the CBD. I always want to speak to the small shadows who I see while driving my car past the various underpasses of Cape Town. And now I do.

As I suspected they are mostly criminals and people who have migrated here from other African Countries. They live in sooty, dirty surroundings and are transient as a result of the city's irregular clean up policies. At some point I suspect it will become clear to me that they are chancers of note. In some way I will have to resist their urge to throw the dice at my feet.

My favourite shot so far is of a man called Christopher who has been through the gaol system. He is the kingpin of a small community who live under an extension to an exisiting structure.

He sits with his hands on his knees.

Samson is the main wearing the chain and he lives with 12 other men from Tanzania.

The woman with the shaved head is 'Sintel' - Chantelle. She aint got no teeth. Her boyfriend is Lunga(Union Jack) from the Eastern Cape. He rules his roost and shaves her head with a bare Wilkinson Sword razor blade exactly like the one I photographed in Pollsmoor(colour shot above). This wrapped blade is what gang members use to climb bluntly through the echelons.

DG

I met with David Goldblatt this morning and persuaded him to stand before some bright lights and a cumbersome camera.

Feeling a bit bad about lining him up in front of such an intimidating Everest of gear I said, 'Do you feel comfortable?'

'As comfortable as it's possible for me to feel given the circumstances.' He replied.

The film was processed in my bath and scanned on my scanner.

The experience was short-lived, but will remain with me for longer than 1/50 s at F16.5.

Mbabane

There are a couple of photographs which I have made over my career which I think are better than others. This is one of them.

. I am the moderator. I can say these things.

Step-up station

When I was in my home town at Christmas time I photographed this small step-up station which was adjacent to a much larger building bult in the same brutal functional style.

For some reason I am attracted to these spartan, planar, form-follows-function structures. I often find subtle tonal variation much more satisfying that graphic, compositional trickery. They also lend themselves to a mode of photography which privileges the technical over the formal which, when one is obsessed with clarity, makes for fun.

Unfortunately these buildings also privileged a small set of white people's operations over a larger underprivileged population. See the building's relationship with the street. Not personable is it? Despite the fact that this is the back of the building I am sure the architects could have negotiated this threshold in a more friendly manner.

These photos have not been retouched.

Books

I taught some kids at the AAA school of Advertising yesterday and the topic was photographer's book, or 'photobooks' as the the genus seems to have been renamed. I crated some corkers of my own to illustrate some opinions and I think I made an impression not least because I swore occasionally.

During the course of the talk I deduced that it's vital to have a printed dummy asap because the hard copy is obviously way more explicit in terms of fuctionality in the hand than a fancy InDesign document.

Gerry Badger, the dude who wrote the text for the aforementioned book, claims that originally there was no emphasis on photo exhibitions so books were the collective animal for photos and they were lodged in archives and museums. He says that this history of photos should be distinguished from established 'formalist' and 'technical' and appreciations of the medium's history.

Here is a good blog which reviews photobooks.

I particularly like the look of the book called 'nerves'.

TJ/Double Negative

I purchased the expensive collaborative set of photobook and novel which was put out by David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavic last year.

In order to charge R1000 for a box set I think that there should be an explicit limitation on the first edition. There are some other gripes which I have with the set, but these are eclipsed by the content which would sell for way more than R1000 if artistic production was valued properly.

The novel, Double Negative, tells the story of a young man who flunks out of 'varsity and meets Saul Auerbach, a photographer, on the recommendation of his, the narrator's, dad. The meeting doesn't seem to have a great impact on the difficult young man, but when, in a later chapter, he returns from a stint in London we realise that he is a photographer.

Neville, the narrator, works for magazines and then is gradually taken up by the artworld.

The novel unwittingly describes parts of my life with unnerving accuracy. Granted I am probably superimposing the negative of my life onto the novel's framework, but it's still true that there is an uncanny congruence.