Seeing the lids of a box with transparent lids

It's from this hotch potch of crap that I bought a very useful grey plastic toolbox/tackle box with two transparent lids.

When I scanned the neg and printed a small test I became convinced that I saw the lids, in ink on the paper print. It wasn't on the table because I had purchased the box prior to this photo being made as a gesture of goodwill towards the static little community who waited patiently for passing guttersnipes.

It's the same sort of quandry which Ivan Vladislavic addresses in my Milnerton Market book when he quotes Andre' Breton:

'André Breton, considering De Chirico’s fascination with certain objects (artichoke, glove, cookie, spool), writes, somewhat cryptically, ‘As far as I am concerned, a mind’s arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility.’ The patterning of objects rests not only with the things themselves but with the disposition of the mind of the observer.

Denzel Willemse wanted what I have

On the dug-up, frayed edges of a wilting, forgotten town called Wepener I encountered this gentleman. He was driving in circles of ever decreasing size around my car whose boot was open to reveal mountains of road trip paraphernalia and over-designed German camera equipment. Finally Denzel and his mate stop suddenly and his friend says, 'Do you have drink?' 'No, I just have water' 'Give it to me'.

The driver snatches the bottle, downs my water(the weather is scorching) and tosses the large 2l bottle onto the dug-up, frayed, forgotten edge road of Wepener.

I ask DW if I can make a photograph of him and he says yes, but before he steps out of the car he makes a quick call. I set up the camera and as if by magic a second shoddy taxi appears carrying two equally dodgy men in the front with Okapis on then brain.

'Are you travelling alone?' asks DW. 'No, I have my dog Cressida.' I whistle loudly and Cressida come sprinting down the dug-up, frayed, forgotten edge road of Wepener.

'Have this nectarine before you go'

Raptor and locust

I found this raptor sleeping quietly in its own down near the Gariep Dam. Strangely the corpus lies near the feathers and if a car caused the damage then it makes no sense. The body would have been flung far from the impact zone. Ed R's 'Royal Road Test' springs to mind. I have always admired this guy's errant genius and incontrovertible taste in roofless cars.

My expert friends from the department of birds tell me it's a Pale Chanting Goshawk which sounds non sensical, pale not being a logical qualifier for a chant. But the name is beautiful. I thought it was a Gabar Goshawk. Either way it's immature. I mean what nut would try and eat a locust off the tar when I car was coming, or...not?

Find a crop attached. The lighting is subtle and a fly can be noted on the fluffy bum of the bird - wings and two big eyes.

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.