Mike Feldman at the Bensusan Museum
by Robyn Sassen
Photography, by virtue of its ability to capture an instant on light-sensitive paper is one that lends itself to a diversity of issues, some ethical, some aesthetic. Eighty-year-old retired optometrist Mike Feldman, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and the Photographic Society of South Africa, has been taking photographs for almost 50 years. His retrospective illustrated how he considers being out there with camera at hand as creatively exciting as being in the darkroom with technology and chemicals at his disposal.
Cognisant of the rich and political history of photography and photographic art in South Africa, he is comfortable to call himself not only an amateur photographer, but a pictorial one. Looking at his extensive retrospective at the Bensusan Museum, the central issue that struck me was the diversity of competent work on show, which perhaps should dignify the appellation 'amateur' with a more credibility than convention would have it. Feldman is not your run-of-the-mill hobbyist.
Currently Vice Chairman of Bensusan's Board, Feldman began taking photographs seriously in the 1950s. The 100 works on show were ordered chronologically, reflecting on changing trends and times. Inevitably, this means that some are dated in terms of photographic values and practices. The textured paper on which the earliest pieces have been printed interferes with the photographic aspect of some of them, but this sets the tone for experimentation, which Feldman conducted relentlessly, through the years.
So we see works using blue tone and sepia tone, for example. We see images where the photographer has been creative in the darkroom and played around with solarisation, with composite prints. They are techniques which speak of 1970s psychedelic possibilities. Also known as 'soot and white wash', solarisation serves to make compositional positives negative and negatives positive, lending an eerie quality. This plays with atmosphere and space and renders the photographic line moot: a solarised line is more like one drawn with a thin pencil of light.
Some of the images, like Sadness, a portrait of a young girl, have a twee quality about them, irrevocably 1970s in its romantic characterisation. But Feldman is not stuck in one kind of aesthetic framework. The solarisation experiments gave way to straight photographic images from Lesotho. Some focused on the people, which lent an interesting historical tone, occasionally making them feel like colonial documents of types. Others focused on the landscape, basking in splendid lighting and contrasts between small goats and massive landscapes.
The 1980s for Feldman was a time of lens-based experimentation and there are images in which he applied Vaseline to the lens, to play with the dynamics of an image, or used what he terms an 'anastigmatic' lens. Deriving from his specialised knowledge of optometry, this cylindrical lens imitates what happens in astigmatism. The effect is an intriguing blurring combined with sharp focus. The image becomes abstract, but is evocative of specific styles of modernist painting.
As photography evolved and the digital age arrived, so Feldman continued to develop his repertoire. The later works show playfulness and experimentation with colour and collage, and with various other types of visual and digital manipulations.
Feldman is not a professional photographer and neither does he claim to be a fine artist. By the same token, he is not just a happy snapper, and the images have merit in terms of their experimental ideals. Some images are truly delightful. His courage to paint with light is not restricted only to quirky experiments, and there are some moving photographs of boys playing street soccer, of impoverished families in Pageview, and of forced removals from the 1980s.
Feldman is a practitioner who delights in the possibilities of what can happen twixt camera lens and eye... and then again in the interval between the time that an image is caught and what can happen to it behind closed doors in the darkroom. A celebration of his work at this time might not be fashionable, but it certainly is warranted.
Closed: January 17
Bensusan Museum of Photography, MuseumAfrica
121 Bree Street, Newtown, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 833 5624
Fax: (011) 833 5636
Email: jonathanf@joburg.org.za or photographiclibrary@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tue - Sun 9am - 5pm
