Ledochowski's world of ephemeral cultural expressions
by Lloyd Pollak
Imagine a mineral garden, a parterre of rubber, iron and concrete. Here hunks of cement erupt into bleeping pinks, klaxon-greens and high decibel blues; metal tubes wring their hands; and rockery stones burst into gingham patterns of checks, candy stripes and polka dots. It sounds like psychedelic fantasy, but this outlandish specimen of outsider art existed once. Miya, a builder and carpenter laid it out in the Guguletu informal settlement of Barcelona in 1990, and before it disappeared, Chris Ledochowski documented it. The resultant photograph typifies the weird beauty of his tense, edgy oeuvre.
A lover of extremity and risk, the artist generates an unflagging sense of wonder as he explores discordance, aberration and incongruity. Wit, irony, ambiguity and contradiction make this foray through terra incognita a thrilling intellectual experience.
Ledochowski, a chuckling iconoclast versed in the cynical machinations of ghetto realpolitik, told me that although photographers working in the leftist documentary tradition would probably heroicise Miya as an altruistic champion of peace, such an interpretation is politically correct cant. In his opinion, Miya, constructed his 'peace garden' partly for his own amusement, partly to advertise his services, and partly to justify his appropriation of so much land by convincing the authorities he was creating a public amenity.
If art is construed as insurgency against clich�, Ledochowski is the heroic guerrilla of the lens, and his startling exhibition, 'Cape Flats Details', provides a view of township life so disconcertingly novel and revolutionary as to continually reduce the viewer to blinking incredulity. Through a combination of photographic innovation and fresh subject matter, Ledochowski reveals the trampoline of vaulting creative energy entombed beneath the mortuary slab of our idees recues.
His Cape Flats are not the grim dumping grounds of convention. Far from being the locus of despair, the township emerges as the cradle of a buoyant and exotic counter-culture. The photographer explores this collective expression of the community's yearning, nostalgia, frustration, hopes and dreams, and reveals how human ingenuity continually transforms the township's barren tracts into a funky black Acropolis of pulsating colour, rhythm and fantasy. Freelance artists blast the shacks apart, and create an illusion of unspoiled nature and boundless space by enveloping walls in sweeping panoramic friezes of ocean, mountain and plain. A blank Vibracrete wall discloses a shimmering vista of Venice's Grand Canal, and provides rousing proof of the township dwellers incorrigible resilience and inventiveness.
For 25 years Ledochowski has documented township life, and over that period his eye has increasingly focused upon what had hitherto been ignored, concealed, suppressed or denied - the astonishing wealth and diversity of creative achievement on the Cape flats. The photographer has created a vast archive of this area's ephemeral 'cultural expressions' many of which revolve around icons of dissidence and revolt or reflect longing for peace, order and stability; hankering for traditional rural life; spiritual aspiration or avid consumerist appetite. Ledochowski thus prospects virgin soil, but it is not just novelty of theme that makes his work so fresh and exhilarating, it is also the magic realism of his colour.
David Goldblatt describes Ledochowski's colour as a protest against "the almost politically correct way of photographing the townships: the accentuation of their harshness by the use of black and white." Ledochowski's take on the townships is affirmative and heroic. Creativity is seen as resistance, power, will. The agency Ledochowski grants the township-dwellers is frequently withheld by the black and white (b&w) documentary tradition, which tends to reify them as supine victims.
Whereas b&w may produce an effect of ethnographic distance, colour signals renunciation of privileged status. Ledochowski first adopted colour when, "in keeping with an old Cape tradition", he started to painstakingly tint his township portraits with photo-oils in order to accentuate their tender deference. Colour invested his sitters with 'greater dignity', and achieved a 'better likeness'. It also dissolved the distance between him and his sitters, turning Ledochowski into an insider portraying the community for the community, rather than an outsider producing images for an audience of another colour and another class.
Like his subject matter, Ledochowski's colour differs radically from any norm. By using Velvia, an exceptionally slow, highly saturated film, and boosting colour in the printing, he raises the temperature of his palette to the point of combustion. Not only do the hues blaze like neon, but Velvia also eliminates grain to produce a seamless slickness. The images pullulate with microscopic detail trapped in miraculously crisp focus, while the dramatic clash of light and shade, inherent in the contrasty film stock, further steps up the sturm und drang.
The effects are seen in House and Garden where the combination of bright sunlight, souped-up colour, telescopic detail and sleek expanses of primary hues, tweak reality up, and lend this twee suburban idyll a hallucinatory intensity. 'Cape Flats Details' continually makes us rub our eyes with amazed disbelief, for over and over again Ledochowski projects us into the hypereal. His is the palette of delirium, the swatch of the acid trip. Wire Globes - a tart comment on globalisation - too induces this sense of nigh supernatural vision as junked tin cans metamorphose into coruscating Faberge orbs and regalia. The gem-incrusted surfaces appear energised, and every detail crackles with energy.
Ledochowski frees his images of all stock associations by avoiding panoramic views and refusing to convey the overall appearance of the township. Usually his camera snatches a mere fragment from the flat's sprawling continuum and thus, rips the image out of context. The radical stylisation of reality reveals Ledochowski as an artist, rather than just another documentary photographer. Everything looks pristine and fresh as a laundered sheet. Dirt, crowds, action and movement absent themselves.
Almost half the images portray pictures within pictures in the form of walls covered in murals or paintings adorning living rooms. Ledochowski's tight close-up and full-frontal arrangements ensure that the painted surfaces fill the picture space. The environment is sluiced away into a sliver of margin, so that muralist's folk-art achieves iconic salience, and dream triumphs over drear reality.
The artist never peddles facile photo-journalistic 'insights'. His images rudely insist upon the viewer's outsider status. The flats remain unamenably alien. The compositions never usher us into the space of the photograph. They function as barriers barring entry. Occasionally 'lighties' (young boys) strike ingratiatingly cute poses in the foreground, but the play-acting is so transparent, we cannot entertain any sentimental illusion that the young boy has revealed anything about himself or his place of origin.
Ledochowski, an astoundingly gifted artist, has, at last, been plucked from obscurity. On a flying visit to South Africa, Carlos Basualdo, the curator of 'The Structure of Survival', one of the eight core shows at the Venice Biennale, was introduced to his work, and immediately arranged for him to participate in his exhibition. The Cape photographer resoundingly vindicates Basualdo's thesis that creative endeavour has become a tactic of survival and combat in the developing worlds' proliferating shantytowns, transforming them into viable and fully functional alternatives to the 'official' city they encircle. One hopes that Ledochowski's Venice debut will bring him the international recognition he so richly deserves.
Opens: June 18
Closes: July 19
Michael Stevenson Contemporary
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Waterkant, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Email: michael@michaelstevenson.com
Website: www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
Lloyd Pollak is an independent critic of long-standing based in Cape Town.
