'Illuminando Vidas' at the Bensusan
by Robyn Sassen
'I have a weapon and the weapon takes me to war ... behind the war is a name, a face, a flowering life ... an expectant bride ... '. These hopeful words, from a poem about war in Mozambique, appear alongside a photograph by Kok Nam, a Mozambican photographer of Chinese descent.
In the photograph a bird's eye view shows a row of civilians walking between men in uniform. Their shadows lie alongside them. The photograph was taken in 1982 at Gorongosa, Sofala Province and, in its visual starkness and rhythm, sets the tone for 'Illuminando Vidas' (Shedding light on lives) a collaborative photo essay on Mozambique from 1950 - 2001.
Another image by 81-year-old veteran photographer Ricardo Rangel suggests a racism which we, as South Africans with experience of apartheid, know in its vulgarity. It's a succinct image of lavatory doors, cropped in just enough to reveal the names on the doors. One says 'Serventes' and the other, 'Homens'. The caption reads 'Where only the black could be a servant and only the white was a man'. The image comes from Lourenço Marques in 1957.
Rangel represents a generation of photographers brave enough to think laterally in a racially cluttered social environment. As the first mixed-race photographer to work in an industry dominated by white Portuguese colonials, Rangel was forced to confront censorship and racially unsympathetic editors.
Grant Lee Neuenberg co-curated this show with Swiss curator Bruno Z'Graggen, and himself shows a video work. Entitled Life Goes On (2001), it cuts from a view of a body of water to a hawker's stand set up with groceries. We look at the groceries, and listen to the comments of the people. There is a subtext which rests on the meaning of the title in relation to the context, but we are not given this; it is allowed to remain sinister and as an undercurrent. Neuenberg is American-born, but has been living and working in Mozambique since 1992.
The exhibition is not only about the vagaries of war. In one image we see a woman's toenails, painted capriciously with spots. In another, a young woman removes a skin purifying facemask. The photographs reveal that there is space for laughter, for flippancy, for beauty and fun in a country beset with internecine and identity-based troubles.
16 photographers took part in this exhibition of 36 images, which derives from a greater body of 150 images that has already travelled to Portugal, Switzerland and Mali. They filled the Bensusan's quasi-industrial space, but tailed off towards the end, hinting at a sense of the unfinished.
Given that it was promoted as a substantially important show, there remained unanswered questions - not in terms of quality or even quantity, but in terms of context. A catalogue in a locked glass cabinet proclaimed itself fairly expensive, but only in Portuguese. Other than the text with the poem that set the tone to some of the works, there is no overt context in which to see the work.
The danger of something like this is always that one is compelled to look at these moving and often magnificent images, as though they were just that: images. The history, the meaning, the relevance gets relegated to what the viewer might think. And as time passes, memory is erased - new intellects enter a framework and without the lived experiences of these issues, they come without the tools of discourse.
Justin Pearce, in the M&G Leisure quoted Z'Graggen commenting on the value of this exhibition in its redressing photography about Mozambique. He also quotes Neuenberg who situates the struggle in South Africa and that in Mozambique as central to developing a photographic language. He concludes that an exhibition of this nature is important in South Africa, because the Mozambican photographic tradition is largely unknown here. Curatorially, the exhibition felt hamstrung: without contextual material, Mozambican photojournalism still feels remote.
Closed: February 20
The Bensusan Museum of Photography, MuseuMAfricA,
121 Bree Street, Newtown, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 833 5624
Email: JonathanF@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tue-Sun 9am-5pm
