Subjectivity on view
by Rima Geffen
Jenny Altschuler is a UCT Fine Arts graduate and head lecturer of photography at CityVarsity Film, Television and Multimedia School. 'Some Seeing' is a selection of both colour and black-and-white work, produced in a series format, by six photographers: Julian Goldswain, Dani Deane, Precious Buyapi Mdledle, Jessica Meyer, Linda Nementzik and Zack Slabbert are all graduates or students of Altschuler's programme.
Altschuler says that she has curated this show around the theme of the "internal experience" and "my obsession with the additional veneer of emotional, psychological and/ or spiritual content, highlighting the subjectivity of the photographer while recording life."
Dani Deane's series of the rotting and aging pears brings up the unavoidable deconstruction of full-bodied life and health, of youth through time and age in a delicate and subtly toned consecutive repetition. Each image is complete by itself and together they tell the story of decomposition.
Alongside conceptually-orientated work are some highly competent documentary series as well. Goldswain explores boxing in Africa, while Mdledle produces a narrative about soccer fans in stadiums.
Slabbert's series of conceptual images defies a fixed interpretation and appeals to the visual senses in its use of flat drawn lines on the surface of the photographs, providing a diagrammatical component to an otherwise already strange juxtaposition of subject and furniture.
Slabbert asks us to question what we perceive as the norm in presenting the female and also in what we perceive as a fixed meaning at all in relation to a set of signs and symbols. An interesting combination of positions of subject, object and signs/ symbols leads us away from our comfort zone once we think we have solved this visual puzzle. This may be a young photographer to watch.
Meyer's series is about the inner experience. The private and personal moment, which tells the story of time passing, expressed technically and aesthetically through slow exposure, sensitive aperture techniques and the subtle use of colour and composition. The result is a display of work that produces a mood that is equal amounts offbeat, uncomfortable and exhilarating.
Her work conjures up such a non-factual set of moments that altered states, or dream states are called to mind. Another body of work that achieves this is Nementzik's 'Dream Scape' which takes on the city and its architecture in muted colour but excludes everyone except the dreamer.
The viewer is a voyeur to the scenes but is never allowed in, remaining on the outside witnessing these strange moments: a child running naked through a street garden, a man photographing the same scene we are witnessing, a dummy in a shop window at night.
Viewed as a whole, this show is an innovative and fresh look at photography of the everyday as well as the subjective moment.
May 7 - June 15
The Gallery at Corporate Museum Frame
Richmond, VA
Rima Geffen is a professor of fine art photography at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, USA.
