Archive: Issue No. 80, April 2004

If one gives in to the uncanny impression that the men in Zwelethu Mthethwa's new series of photographs are waiting for something or someone, one sets in motion a whole train of problems. The stark simplicity of the Jack Shainman Gallery in Manhattan no doubt contributes to this initial feeling, since its silence and white walls encompass a world that is as far-removed as any can be from the landscape and history to which the sugarcane workers are so obviously connected.

They are workers, after all, and the photographer, he and I agree in discussion, is not so much an intruder as an interrupter. The photographer has his own great game to play with time because, as Roland Barthes reminds us, he gives us in his photographs of the living, a glimpse of death.

But here Mthethwa interrupts work quite literally, taking up time. Unlike so many of his other subjects, whom he has, until now, photographed in their homes or other interiors, these men are caught in their working garb, between lines of sugarcane, against the backdrop of the rolling hills of northern KwaZulu Natal. They have no time to negotiate appointments or to dress up for photographs. They, and the man taking their pictures, are snatching moments between bursts of intense, backbreaking work. No, they are certainly not waiting.

In 'Lines of Negotiation' Mthethwa engages with the nagging questions that plague any photographer who chooses as his or her subject the person engaged in hard, physical labour. Even when not at work, Walker Evans discovered, the labourer-as-subject poses problems. There is always that overused word 'dignity' to fall back upon in describing the mingled pride, physical presence, and tiredness of the worker, as if the photograph, or our looking at it, confer this quality upon the subject. But this series, Mthethwa tells me, has very little to do with dignity.

There is also the danger of mythologizing labour, or, worse, casting drudgery as an aesthetic. The latter is part of a debate that will, no doubt, go on for some time, but the notion of a mythology of labour is what Mthethwa deliberately interrupts.

Sugarcane harvesting is closer to forms of industrial labour than it is to most agricultural work because of the harshness of the working environment. The scarred, blackened fields are testament to the violence inflicted on the earth in this kind of farming. Cane must be burnt and then sliced with a machete, and the fields treated with a chemical so noxious that the workers employ all kinds of evasive tactics to keep from inhaling or coming into contact with the poison. They wear several layers of clothing, despite the heat, to protect themselves from the viciously sharp serrated leaves, the machetes, and the cut cane. The hands of the cane workers, Mthethwa points out to me, are heavily scarred and lacerated, and their faces and exposed arms are blackened by soot. And then there are the snakes and other denizens of the cane fields against which the workers close the tops of their boots by lacing their trousers tightly to their legs. The cane fields are situated in an agricultural war zone. Not coincidentally they are also located at the nexus of a politically, socially, and environmentally troubled zone. Even though the farms may have changed hands, the field workers are doing the same work they have always done in this war zone.

But then these men have attitude, which, in street speak, is a word that suggests to me both defiance and celebration. Some of them, one might say, even swagger. One young man stands with arms crossed and legs parted, weight slightly back on the heels. He has given himself to the photographer's time, but he is a slippery customer, self-conscious, playful, distant, brash, and, for a moment, elsewhere.

By contrast, an older man in another photograph has none of this defiance. In this shot, the machete is not a weapon but a counterbalance to the kierie (or club) in the man's left hand. The gaze is steady, the stance set, but there is resignation in his bearing. Mthethwa has created three distinct compositional layers here: the soot-blackened man in the foreground; a row of partly burnt cane some metres behind him, their tops still green and waving in the breeze; and, behind the cane, a rolling horizon of terraced fields.

The elderly man's stance and his placement in the centre of the shot make him almost proprietorial, the red scarf adorning his head giving him a royal look. Except that there is intense weariness in his face. He dominates the scene in the momentary space of the camera's opening and closing eye, but outside of that moment, he is ground down by work.

In the most enigmatic photograph in the series, Mthethwa shoots his subject from slightly lower than usual. One has the impression that the man, his face half in shadow from a dying sun, the hood of his garment pulled up over his head, is looking at the viewer with contempt. Leaning slightly to his left on his machete, his boots and his laced trousers blackened from soot, he looks like a medieval hangman rising out of the ground. The top right half of his torso and head catch the light, leaving only one eye visible. He is menacing and defiant, his body containing all of the tension of his relationship to the photographer and to the burning landscape around him. Mthethwa laughs when I ask him about this picture. "I can laugh," he tells me, "because I know what was going on in that picture." He does not elaborate.

Mthethwa obviously relishes his subjects' participation in the photographic act but he instinctively stands away from the men. In every photograph he has preserved the distance that they seem to have thrown down between themselves and the viewer. He has also not imposed on them the laboriousness of a tripod but has instead used a hand-held camera. What we see, then, is a subtle mix of the fixedness that a posed portrait inevitably generates and a blurred indefiniteness, partly from camera shake and partly from the haze created by bright sunlight or late afternoon shadow.

The men are fixed to the spot. They have ceased working to have their portraits taken, but any fixity of gaze, posture, or setting is undercut by Mthethwa's working method and his careful framing of the subjects against the dancing, burning sugarcane.

Sugarcane, I am told, is a difficult green to photograph since it is so cold. Whenever Mthethwa incorporates the natural landscape, the telltale rolling hills that Alan Paton immortalised in the opening lines of his novel Cry, the Beloved Country, we notice this coldness, and the fact that the cane dominates the scene as far as the eye can see. In two giant prints that hang at ninety degrees to each other in a separate room of the gallery, Mthethwa conveys the odd mix of warmth and coldness in the landscape.

In one, a man stands before a field of smouldering cane. Despite the heat of fire and a midday sun, the tone of the photograph is, with its blues and greens, intensely cold. The man squints into the sun, his machete at his side and his right foot on a rock. In the second shot, Mthethwa moves his human subject off-centre. A late-afternoon haze rolls over the hills receding behind the man. To the right, a pile of burnt sugarcane is stacked up against the base of the picture, barring our access to the warm, yellow scenery. The man in the photograph is a quasi-romantic figure, the lines of his working clothes blurred so that he almost resolves into the landscape. But then there is the ubiquitous machete, the pile of blackened cane, and the intense, sideways stare of the man.

Here is an interruption that is both spatial and conceptual, acquiesced to by the photographer, who has seen the barrier of cane against the landscape, and the man whose glowering expression cuts off any sentimental attachment to the natural environment.

Mthethwa confesses that he was surprised to be reminded of the differences between himself and the sugarcane workers. He spent several months at a few farms in order to get to know and be familiar to the people he wanted to photograph. He did not want to be an intruder, and assumed that since he was from Durban and was a black photographer, they would see him as one of them. To have them convey to him, by politely refusing to eat with him, the enormous class and economic differences between them, shifted the political and social ground of the issues in which his photographs would inevitably be embedded.

Mthethwa is alive to the mythological resonance of the landscape in which he is at work, with its fires and strangely-garbed characters, and its place in literary and cultural traditions, but he is quietly working away at the assumptions, some of them his own, that shore up this mythology. In contemporary South Africa, perhaps the most difficult lines of negotiation are in the relation of workers to land and to landowners.

Mthethwa chose this title for his series because sugarcane is cut in straight lines, the workers placed along the rows and moving steadily forward with their machetes. But he never shows us these men at work. He has chosen, instead, to halt the swing of the machete for the moment of the photograph, as if doing so will somehow drive a wedge into history.

March 18 - April 17