Santu Mofokeng at the Standard Bank Gallery
by Michael Smith
Documentary photographers seem to be attracted to conflict zones like flies to corpses. This tendency could probably be traced back to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and the rest of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers of 1920s and 1930s USA. Commissioned, as they were, to provide evidence of the plight of rural Americans for Congress, their brief was explicitly to track down and record archetypes of misery, destitution and neglect. A direct link was established, one that apparently became hardwired into the DNA of subsequent documentary photographers, that the more acute the suffering imaged, the greater the chances the image would have the desired effect on those who could do something about that suffering.
Since then, this has been the tacit rationalisation for some of the most brutal and exploitative images produced in our age, through the medium of photography; in this age of image-information overload, the logic seems to run, change, or at least reaction, can only be caused by the most extreme images. Yet something was never quite right with that argument. Most people's reaction to these images would simply be to quickly turn the page to avoid looking at the starving child in the World Vision advert. A few would get involved, committing disembodied acts of charity through any number of unverifiable institutions. Very few would be moved to join travelling aid organisations; even fewer would stop buying products from countries or corporations that also sold arms to conflict protagonists. So it seemed that, by the late 80s, documentary photography had arguably painted itself into a corner, its practitioners caught in a loser's game of scrabbling to find the next Ethiopia, the next Sudan, the next horror.
Yet in South Africa, with its very real climate of disconnection from the rest of the world, photography morphed into something else. Sure, there was the Bang Bang Club, specialising as it did in images from our pre-1994 civil war; and of course a generation before came images from the Staffrider photographers, often documenting aspects of SA life the Nationalist government would rather no-one saw. But on the periphery of such activity, artists like Santu Mofokeng were using photography to map out a broader take on the Black South African experience. Interestingly, Mofokeng was aligned with the Afrapix collective from which the four members of the so-called Bang Bang Club emerged; yet this show, entitled 'Invoice', seeks out other realities explored by Mofokeng, and does so with images that have other lives beyond reportage on conflict.
Therein lies the didactic value of this show: functioning as a survey show rather than a retrospective, it never sacrifices depth for breadth, somehow managing both. Mofokeng's impulse to record violence (or at least the threat of it), poverty and hardship is shown as only one side of his amazing oeuvre. The work on this show reveals an interest in all aspects of Black South African life, and crucially allows Mofokeng's personal sense of that experience to take centre stage.
The images are grouped together under themes, a common curatorial solution to making sense of an extensive career. These serve as conceptual threads of connection rather than strict rubrics. They are useful for delineating approximate periods during which particular themes were explored, but also for shaping such a massive body of work for viewer consumption. In each section, Mofokeng reveals the extent of his ability to find moments, images and compositions that hint at the narrative on either temporal side of themselves, yet leave that narrative tantalisingly incomplete. Here an old man stares at the camera, his fading eyesight evidenced by milky cataracts (Eyes-Wide-Shut, Motouleng Cave, Clarens); there a group of aged people gather to travel somewhere (Pensioners En Route); elsewhere a child urinates in the squalor of a nighttime Soweto scene (Near Maponya's Discount Store, Dube).
Yet many groups of works reveal a sustained interest in a particular motif. Of great interest at the show's opening was the series dealing with billboards and signs as they insert themselves into the literal landscapes of everyday human life. Spanning more than 15 years, the series explores the potential for the hollowness of capitalist rhetoric and promises to be quietly subverted into social commentary when it is juxtaposed with glimpsed details of 'real' life. A work from 1991, Winter in Tembisa, pits an OMO washing powder billboard against the air pollution of an under-serviced township; OMO's promise of a cleaner wash seems disingenuous in the face of all-enveloping smog. Across the passage from this little image, two larger photographs from more recent times explore the co-opting of the language of the struggle by advertising. In the first, 'Y'ello Freedom', Baragwanath Terminus, Diepkloof (c. 2004), a woman struggles under the weight of her baggage against the backdrop of an MTN billboard cashing in on the '10 years of democracy' celebrations. Freedom seems painfully elusive for such a person, despite her chance at being 'free to speak' in a post-apartheid paradigm.
A neighbouring image mines the same strip, but the effect is even more incisive: the silhouette of a ragged-looking man pushing a trolley of meagre
possessions within sight of an illuminated billboard bearing the picture of a huge diamond, and the curiously ambiguous slogan 'Democracy is forever' ('Democracy is Forever', Pimville [2004]). The 'forever' with which this man contends is tainted by the fact that he and millions like him missed out on 'democracy's' spoils. Here the sophistication of Mofokeng's social commentary is, like that of his peer David Goldblatt, palpable through the most simple yet strategic of means. Like Goldblatt, Mofokeng understands the potential of the fantasy world of advertising to facilitate acerbic observations about the non-fanstasy world of Johannesburg; unlike Goldblatt he finds these opportunities in historically Black urban spaces, where the fantasy is far less believable and thus rendered more desperate.
As I leave the space, I notice some images of landscapes and interiors that look decidedly un-African. They turn out to be scenes from Auschwitz and Hanoi as they were when Mofokeng visited them, historical sites of murder and atrocities. While exploring an area in the Free State that had been used as a concentration camp 'for Natives' Mofokeng had become interested in other sites around the world that bore similar baggage, and were plagued by similar ghosts of past abominations. Yet most of the images are positively nondescript; offices, rooms, train terminuses, all treated anonymously as if to express Mofokeng's interest in 'the banality of horror', a very different impulse from the one that drives photojournalists to war-torn countries. It was in this series that I found his greatest departure from the strictures of classic documentary photography. Like the opening sequence of the groundbreaking Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, the anonymity of landscapes and interiors in this context is both poetic and ominous, a complexity that standard documentary can seldom manage.
Throughout the show, one's sense is that Mofokeng's career demands a new definition of 'documentary'. That is possibly what all truly valuable art does: outgrows definitions, shakes up the canon and necessitates a redefinition of the terms of production.
Opens: January 30
Closes: March 17
The Standard Bank Gallery
cnr Simmonds and Frederick Street, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 631 1889
www.standardbankgallery.co.za/
Hours: Mon - Fri 8am - 4pm, Sat 9am - 1pm
