Quiet images silence Babelonic cacophony of happy snappers

PH Centre’s second show, Single Shot, featuring top photographers is all about parting pictorial Red Sea.

When Susan Sontag wrote that "needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted", it was 1977 — a world without digital photography.

Deloitte Global predicted 2.5-trillion photos would be shared or stored online in 2016; more than 350-million were uploaded to Facebook alone daily.

"We’re inundated with so much imagery," says Simone Tredoux, director of the PH Centre, a compact Cape Town gallery space and bookstore dedicated solely to the medium of photography.

PH Centre’s second show, Single Shot, is all about parting this pictorial Red Sea. A mere 21 pictures march around the room, none oversized, none clamouring for attention.

Each photograph has been chosen by a South African photographer, from his or her personal portfolios. Each had to be either career-defining, or reflect their personal aesthetic of a good shot, but also be somehow special or interesting to them.

The results are surprisingly quiet in a world used to cacophony. The photographers have come from different sectors, from fashion to film.

At least six of them — Guy Neveling, Trevor Samson, Ruvan Boshoff, Eric Miller, Justin Sholk and Dale Yudelman — were press photographers in the 1970s and 1980s. Melinda Stuurman still is: Her shot of a Tafelsig shack dweller reflected in a piece of mirror on a vibracrete wall is part of an ongoing series shot for Die Son.

There are few straightforward portraits or "captures", few celebrities and little blatant action: the drama of the moment has been passed over.

The most traditional "news" shot is Samson’s huddle of family at a political funeral in 1985 as a young Desmond Tutu prays above them. Miller’s Cosatu House Siege taken in 1987 is an evocative study in light and dark, provoking unease.

A more confrontational scene is Antonia Steyn’s portrait of a stooped Eugene Terre’Blanche attempting to control his giant black Friesian horse, Atilla. As Steyn explains in the catalogue, the grounded Terre’Blanche is reduced and defenceless — far from the saviour of the volk he had imagined himself to be.

Even Yasser Booley’s slightly battered Stroller (1999), showing a tough-a*s-looking kid glaring at the lens becomes vulnerable upon learning the child asked to be photographed — and posed himself. "The image is an example of how perception and therefore meaning can change with context," Booley says.

Other shots hint at action outside the frame: Dale Yudelman’s Christmas Parade, Johannesburg, in which a child watches a scene from a gap between adult legs — and the well-juxtaposed Chris, by Guy Neveling, in which a man watches another emerge from a gap in a vibracrete wall. Some are oblique portraits, such as Ebrahim Hajee’s Red Gold, an unidentifiable composite of images of illegal miners. Others are contemplative, such as Marc Shoul’s tangled playground slide. Tredoux says some photographers were nervous about choosing just one shot.

"It’s a revealing space to put yourself in. They had to single out one shot out of their entire career that stands almost as a monument to their talent."

As the catalogue says, the show points to the value of information that can be contained in an individual photograph. The differences between these shots and the "glut" of imagery out there?

For mere snappers, "the process of taking the photograph is irrelevant", says Tredoux. Photographers remember the experience, the context, "the smell of the air around them…. They’re also reflecting on the world around them, not taking pictures of themselves within the world," Tredoux says.

The PH Centre belongs to Pieter and Lauren Badenhorst, owners of photo equipment and studio hire business Photohire and art photography printing business Bad Hen Lab.

In the early 2000s, Badenhorst opened a gallery space called The Cold Room in Harrington Street; Pieter Hugo was one of those who showed here. PH Centre, which opened in December 2016, is Badenhorst’s attempt to get back into "the art side of photography" — besides being a collector.

Its first show, Uniform, featured works from his own collection, from Pieter Hugo to Nobukho Nqaba.

We want to be a very inclusive, collaborative space and want people to feel they can come here and get information about photography

Badenhorst looked at iconic venues dedicated to the medium, such as London’s Photographer’s Gallery (opened in 1971 in a converted Lyon’s Tea Bar), Amsterdam’s Foam (2001) and New York’s ICP (1974).

The new space is considerably more modest, but it has an admirable stash of magazines such as PDN, foam and the British Journal of Photography. Books lie sleek and tantalising on tables, and there is a window seat from which to sit and stare at things.

Cape Town is also getting the new Roger Ballen Centre of Photography, due to open in September as one of six centres in the new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa at the V&A Waterfront.

"But we need to provide young photographers with spaces and platforms to showcase their work," says Badenhorst. That is what PH Centre hopes to do – as well as be a place for practitioners to "come and shoot the breeze; talk about ideas and images".

"Our aim is to support the insiders and the outsiders [emerging and established photographers]," says Tredoux.

"We want to be a very inclusive, collaborative space and want people to feel they can come here and get information about photography."

There are plans for book launches, talks, workshops and eight to 10 shows a year.

Interest in South African photography, and images from the continent, remains buoyant. Tredoux says Africa is "demanding a voice". She believes African photographers can demonstrate a different aesthetic, a different filter, a more authentic perspective. "It’s not about looking for the exotic; it’s about having control of their own image."

At the show, there is an image by Kyle Weeks of a palm wine tapper in Namibia, miraculously perched on a trunk; a spidery silhouette in Tredoux’s latest show. It is otherworldly and yes, exotic, but once more there is a stillness, a gentleness.

Weeks had previously produced a series of some of the same Ovahimba men, self-styled, and with the shutter release in their own hands to narrow that tricky gap between subject and lens.

"These men understood something about the constructed/fluid nature of personal and cultural identity," Weeks writes. Happily, it appears much the same can be said for the choices of works up at Single Shot.

• Single Shot is at PH Centre in Maynard Street, Gardens, until June 30.