Documenting the cultural fabric of the Cape Flats
by Rory Bester
Cape Flats Details is the third offering in the South African History Online Photographic Series. The series is edited by Omar Badsha and previous productions include Imperial Ghetto: Ways of Seeing in a South African City (2001) and Amulets and Dreams: War, Youth and Change in Africa (2002), variously featuring the work of Omar Badsha and Guy Tillim. This new publication comes hot on the heals of the inclusion of Cape Flats Details in Carlos Basualdo's curated exhibition, 'The Structure of Survival', at this year's Venice Biennale, and solo showings of Ledochowski's work at Michael Stevenson Contemporary in Cape Town and Photo ZA in Johannesburg.
The book is a dense collection of tightly packed photographs that sometimes have difficulty breathing by themselves. But their collective energies portray everything from afternoon tea to shebeen and tavern life, from initiation ceremonies to religious rituals, and from jazz jamming to choir practice. And in almost every image it is the visual language of these spaces that captures Ledochowski's eye. These private and public spaces of his photographs are variously dominated by painted murals, shop signage, paintings, pen on cardboard, wooden and wire sculpture, traditional dress, peace gardens, and graffiti. It makes for an intense and remarkable visual experience.
Ledochowski studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in the late 1970s, a time when the Peninsula was being 'whitened' and people of colour were relocated to the desolate Cape Flats. Ledochowski spurned the school's art-for-art's sake idiom in favour of more politically motivated documentation and, according to David Goldblatt in the foreword, "in his final year at Michaelis he photographed some of the last people forced to leave Harfield Village after their dispossession under the Group Areas Act".
In the 1980s, Ledochowski became a founding member of Afrascope, an anti-apartheid film and video unit, and also joined Afrapix, a similarly minded photographer's collective. It is with this background and in this spirit that Ledochowski began photographing the people and spaces that make up Cape Flats Details. Taken between the mid-1980s and the present, the photographs record a period of dramatic historical change. But because of the photographer's preoccupation with the visual details of life, these differences are hidden beyond the passing glance.
The book's introduction includes some of Ledochowski's hand-coloured family portraits produced under the auspices of a small business he started in the mid-1980s. His use of the hand-coloured portraits at the onset reveals a particular attitude to colour, one that he explains in his text: "I sought to create a tension between the original, sometimes hardcore intentions of the black-and-white image, and the effect that this added colour would have on its overall meaning. It was while exploring ways of making more positive images which could still be of documentary value that I began to focus on the significance of colour and its creative use in people's lives and cultural expression".
While the bulk of the photographs that make up the book are not hand-coloured, they are nonetheless saturated in ways that evoke additional colouring. So it is against our expectations of black-and-white, and against the ideological statements of township life that Ledochowski explores the many and varied visual languages that intersect culture and everyday life on the Cape Flats.
The Cape Flats is a windswept, waterlogged area to the west of the City of Cape Town. It includes places such as Bonteheuwel, Crossroads, Guguletu, Hanover Park, Khayelitsha, Langa, Lavender Hill, Manenberg, Mitchell's Plain, Nyanga and Philippi, each of which has had its moment of torment in Apartheid history. But in the face of this rigid history of dislocation, communities reconstituted themselves, and it is out of the cultural fabric of this reconstituted life that Ledochowski makes visual and written records of consummate detail.
There is an ease with which Ledochowski moves through the many and varied social spaces of the Cape Flats, and the reader is left with an abiding sense that the photographer is very much a part of the fabric of the subject communities (more so, I think, than the exhibition achieved). A definitive marker of the success of Ledochowski's book is the extent to which the selection and arrangement of images supersedes the lived experience of deep physical and emotional divisions between Black and Coloured townships on the Cape Flats. It is an inspiration to an experience of the future.
Chris Ledochowski, Cape Flats Details, Softcover
Publisher: South African History Online and Unisa Press, 2003
ISBN: 0-620-30458-8
Price: R295
