IN THE art world photography remains South Africa’s greatest export. The global travelling photographic show, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, curated by Nigerian superstar Okwui Enwezor, who is also director of the next Venice Biennale, is proof of the sentient power of the medium.
Most commonly perceived as a medium for documentary and as an efficient and economical means to tell a story of struggle, photography has proven to be the uberoptic through which to narrate a nation. But as Enwezor points out, photography can also "defy the language of social documentary and the language of photojournalism".
David Goldblatt, for example, is now a global star best known for his dispassionate record of the country’s racist history. Without overt ideological posturing, Goldblatt was able to implicate the viewer in the problem of inequality, while Santu Mofokeng, who has had a major retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris, offers another more subtle and sublime inroad into the South African condition.
Recently I visited Room, a gallery in Braamfontein, and stumbled upon the work of a young photographer, Mack Magagane who, for me, best captured photography’s role in the present moment.
Like the work of Goldblatt, Magagane’s images were coolly detached, but unlike Goldblatt’s bleached urban landscapes these were ruminative, brooding, cinematic. I realised that here was a photographer who had freed himself from the burden of documentary and the political angst of the Bang-Bang Club, and who, like Mofokeng, well understood the power of enigma.
It is this recognition of the hidden amid the seen, the secret life which inhabits us and scuppers easy cognition, which has increasingly come to the fore in South African photography. Finally freed from a pathological and raced optic and the tawdry end-game of identity politics, our photographers are showings us worlds beyond the pathos of struggle.
A brilliant case in point is Roger Ballen, an American domiciled in South Africa for many years, who has led the way in creating a novel sense of being and place. A transatlantic artist, mired in the unconscious, Ballen constructs theatrical scenes which estrange and derange the senses.
Absurd, perplexing, and downright freaky and odd, his images defy common sense and cognitive objectivity.
The subject of two recent books, Die Antwoord (Prestel) and Asylum of the Birds, Ballen’s work marks a stratospheric rise in South African photography, and its coming of age. Combining the enigmatic and the unconscious, Ballen effectively opens up the question of the human.
For him, beings cannot be easily categorised, their motivations glibly deciphered. By scrambling both objectivity and intent, Ballen shows us the value of immanence and uncertainty. A refreshing shift from the staple of documentary realism, Roger Ballen is blazing a brilliant pathway for a younger generation of photographers such as Mack Magagane.
In the closing chapter in Asylum of the Birds, Ballen states: "I am basically an organiser — organising visual chaos into coherency."
It is this reconstructive dimension, this doctoring of the real, which deserves further consideration. Ballen does not record what he sees; he breaks down and rearranges the lived world. Active rather than passive, Ballen forcefully reminds us that we are not the hapless victims of history, but its agents.
If his photographic study of the global South African celebrities, Die Antwoord, showcases the power of posturing and reinventing the self, then Asylum of the Birds reminds us just how central this drive is to all of us. While the images seem bleak, even ominous, they are never pathological.
If Ballen, like Withnail, steps into "the arena of the unwell", it is because he refuses to see it as the mere opposite of health. As Michel Foucault reminded us, we built prisons and asylums the better to establish normalcy.
For Ballen this juxtaposition was always intrinsically false. His world is never black and white. This is his great contribution to South African photography. What is certain is that his images mesmerise and surprise us.
All-importantly, they tell us that stories are never simple and never clear cut.
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