CHRISTINE FRISINGHELLI, WALTER SEIDL

To the project "I am not afraid"

“I am not afraid”. This is the title of a work by the young South African artist Nontsikelelo Veleko, whose proclamative nature not only seemed suitable to us in view of the present issue of Camera Austria, with which we are now celebrating the 100th issue of this magazine – no, the title of this photograph, “I am not afraid”, that refers to a piece of graffiti found in the city of Johannesburg, also provides a direct lead-in to the topic of this issue.

This (anniversary) issue of Camera Austria is dedicated to the Market Photo Workshop – a school of photography that was founded by David Goldblatt in Johannesburg at the end of the 1980s, and that was open to all ethnic groups even during the Apartheid era – and its students and graduates. From the outset, the Market Photo Workshop always gave special attention to issues that impacted on the social and political life of South Africa during and after Apartheid. With their photographic practice and artistic work, they tackle the pressing political issues facing the country in a very immediate way. The examination of the structure and order of the public space is often the starting point for the photographers´ work, who often have to face dangers in their research and actions. For their work confronts the photographers with different forms of precariousness that are manifested in migration, violence, homelessness, HIV and discrimination against women, and that count among the glaring socio-political problems of everyday life in South Africa.

Issues negotiated in the post-colonial theoretical discourse since the 1990s in the western context often manifest themselves in very concrete terms in harsh South African everyday life: Here, every individual is forced by his or her personal fate to examine the situation and take a stance.

In addition to the positions and documentations presented in this issue, a number of authors provide insights into artistic and socio-political analysis with and of photography in South Africa: David Goldblatt and Joyce Ozynski provide an introduction to the historical context of the Workshop’s foundation, describing the original hopes and intentions from the viewpoint of the current political situation. Historian Patricia Hayes writes about contemporary documentary practice in South Africa in respect of the committed activism of the anti-Apartheid movement, to which photography made a substantial contribution. John Fleetwood, head of the Market Photo Workshop, reports on the possibilities and functioning of an independent education centre in modern South Africa. Art historian Rory Bester introduces us to the documentary practices of contemporary photography in South Africa and to the published works showcased at the exhibition. In a conversation between photo artist Jo Ractliffe, photojournalist Peter McKenzie and critic Sean O’Toole, we learn about the different artistic attitudes and common ethical principles in the battle against state violence and discrimination.

We would like to thank all those involved – photographers, employees of the Workshop, authors – who were enthusiastic about the idea behind this project and who joined forces with us on bringing it to fruition. For his enthusiasm and indispensable support, thanks are due above all to David Goldblatt, and these thanks also go to Lily Goldblatt, who accompanied us on all our paths around Johannesburg. John Fleetwood introduced us to the Market Photo Workshop and granted an insight into the work of several generations of Workshop photographers; to him and his team – first and foremost Lester Adams and Sydelle Willow Smith – we are much obliged for every conceivable assistance in developing the project in terms of content and coping with all technical steps in carrying out the exhibition and publication: This project would not exist without them.

Christine Frisinghelli, Walter Seidl
November 2007

Text feature in Camera Austria International 100/2007, p. 12.

DAVID GOLDBLATT

Dear Christine

You phoned me a few months ago to say that you would like to celebrate the occasion of the 100th issue of Camera Austria, by looking to the future rather than the past, and that you would like to do this by giving attention to the work and people of the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. All of us here who are connected with the Workshop are greatly pleased and honoured by your choice. For us it is no small thing and we thank you.

In putting the emphasis on the future you have prodded me into trying to articulate some thoughts, not all of them very comfortable about the future of the Workshop, and the photography that might come out of it. But let me begin by telling of the past.

The Market Theatre, with which the Workshop is intimately connected, came into being at the height of apartheid. The law then was very clear: Racially mixed theatre was illegal. Although one race could watch another race perform, the cast could not be mixed nor could the audience be mixed. The two men who started the Market Theatre, Barney Simon and Manny Manim, laid down a straightforward, inviolable principle: There would be no racial restrictions whatever within the Market Theatre. No racially defined audiences, no restrictions on whom a director could have in the cast, no lavatories marked “Whites” and “Non Whites”. Just people. It is difficult now to describe the simple joy and exhilaration of going to that place and participating with fellow citizens of all colours in the richness of the theatre that came out of it. Shrewdly, the government allowed it. At a time when the world was increasingly critical of apartheid, they could point to the Market as an example of their “tolerance”.

When the Workshop was started in the late 1980s it made sense that it should do so under the umbrella of the Market Theatre which had established an international reputation for its work and its stance on apartheid. The umbrella provided the Workshop with administrative infrastructure as well as respectability among international funders. The Workshop was founded and funded on the ideal of making visual literacy and photographic craft available to people of all races, especially those to whom apartheid had largely denied the possibility of acquiring such skills. It was unique in apartheid South Africa. This idea has worked and been elaborated on, so that the Workshop is now a sophisticated and effective school of photography. Between 150 and 200 students pass through there each year, many of whom go on to become professional photographers in a variety of fields. The success of the Workshop is very largely due to the quality and idealism of the people who have run it and taught there. Their dedication has gone far beyond the limited fees that could be paid to them. Underlying, even inspiring that dedication and the Workshop itself, has been an unspoken, vague and yet identifiable spirit or ethic that has permeated much of the teaching and the photography that has come out of the Workshop.

It was a spirit that grew out of the struggle against apartheid. The zeitgeist almost demanded a photographic response that was based in “real” rather than conceptual issues. Students were inspired by photographers like Ernest Cole, Alf Khumalo, Peter Magubane, Gideon Mendel, Themba Nkosi, the Afrapix photographers and later, in the 1990s, the Bang-Bang Club. Not that the Workshop became a hotbed of “struggle photography”, But there was a certain earnestness; a passion for so-called documentary work that probed and resisted the status quo.

We are out of apartheid now and we are seeing a new generation of young people at the Workshop – Blacks who have not grown up under the pall of Bantu education with its crippling effects on personal development; Whites not loaded with guilt. They tend, these new students, to be full of energy and self-confidence and their photography shows it. If there is an increasing tendency towards self-absorption – navel-gazing – there is, still, a concern with social issues. What of the future?

We South Africans are in a vastly better place now than we were under apartheid and it is salutary, as criminal violence, poverty, unemployment, AIDS and many other present ills weigh us down, to remember where we have come from. But that should not blind us to problems that bite harshly into tens of millions of lives here. Less immediate but no less worrying are tendencies that seriously threaten our young and vulnerable democracy – authoritarianism in government, divisions in public life that are increasingly racial rather than policy based, and a manic pursuit of wealth and power that excuses almost any corruption. The rule of law has hardly begun to take root. What has all this to do with a little school of photography? Perhaps very little if we were an art school or one for hobbyists or a technical college concerned with pushing students to earn diplomas. But while there is a bit of each of these in the Workshop it is not any of them. It is a hybrid organisation grounded in an unspoken but discernible ethic that is concerned with the public good, with what is happening in the society within which it functions. For a number of reasons I fear for that ethic.

There is no longer a clearly identifiable “enemy”. There is a vastly complex social reality in which it is not easy to formulate a critical sensibility and, especially, one that can be photographically expressed. Further, slow as it is, there is rising prosperity and with it, understandably, the enjoyment of comfort and luxury. Whether consumerism will tend to promote acceptance of the status quo rather than challenges to it among our students remains to be seen.

During apartheid the Market Theatre Foundation and the Workshop refused any form of funding or assistance from the state. With the end of apartheid that policy changed and was later completely reversed when the Market Theatre fell on bad times. In order to prevent its bankruptcy and disappearance the state’s Department of Arts and Culture took it over and is now its principal source of funding. Formally and financially the Workshop was part of the Foundation and had either to break away and go independent, which would have been very difficult but possible, or accept the new dispensation. It accepted.

So far the Department of Arts and Culture has adopted an arms-length approach to the Theatre and the Workshop. But there is no assurance that this will always be so. There are disquieting tendencies in government which indicate a general tightening of the milieu within which the media and the arts can function. However, even under a benign regime, there is, in my opinion, something inherently discomforting in the Workshop being tied organically to the state and being dependent on it for the major part of its funding. The Department is ultimately controlled by politicians whose principal concern is the conservation and extension of their power. Students should be free to challenge, to think the unthinkable, to be iconoclastic and in my opinion the Workshop should be a place where they can be encouraged to do that. We should be wary of taking comfort in the arms of the state.

Again Christine, thank you for honouring the Workshop in Camera Austria.

David

Text feature in Camera Austria International 100/2007, p. 13.

JOYCE OZYNSKI

Market Photo Workshop

[…] Life in South Africa had always been static. There was the army, the media, the array of repressive legislation and the white-controlled economy to contend with. The ANC and others had been trying to impinge on this fortress for decades. One knew what to expect. Only the degree of cynicism had to grow greater as the mind struggled to encompass revelations of the National Party and Inkatha?s brutality. Who could believe all this? We had to, and then we had to try to anticipate it.
In South Africa in the 70s, 80s and the 90s, every thinking person articulated their world view in contradiction to that “reality” by the National Party. The saturation propaganda, the euphemism of “separate but equal” geography of the Bantustans, the relentless stifling of thought, in the form of film, newspapers, calendars, T-shirts, books, magazines, sought to create a false reality. Areas of conflict where police shot protesters were off limits to the press. Newspapers had to publish police versions of events right next to the reporter’s story. To bear witness to one’s experience has been central to the liberation from the tyranny of the previous government.
Driving the selfless participation of the many, many people working in the Market Theatre, the gallery and the workshop, was the affirmation of the value of every human being, no matter how humble. Implicit in every action and every work of art was a contradiction of the idea of the racial aristocracy of the whites. Our society was structured around the deep mechanical belief that the people other than whites were valueless. In asserting the contrary, photography played a key role because of its evidentiary nature. It restored what had been taken away: dignity, humanity, vulnerability. […]

Text feature in Camera Austria International 100/2007, pp. 15–17.

JO RACTLIFFE, PETER MCKENZIE, SEAN O'TOOLE

Pre-post: A Trajectory in South African Photography

Sean O’Toole: Very often in discussions of contemporary South African photography, and I would say I’m a guilty culprit here too, commentators have tended to speak of the 1990s signalling a break in continuity. After decades of socially committed photography, Drummagazine in the 1950s and early 1960s, and more pointedly the socially committed vision of the Afrapix collective in the 1980s, it seems that after Mandela’s release and the transition to a non-racial democracy photography splintered. At least so goes the master narrative. Or will history, which is good at flattening things, simply define the 1990s as the identity decade?

Jo Ractliffe: I remember in the mid 1990s there was much debate about the “crisis in photography”, that with the advent of democracy, photographers “lost” their subject. But I think it was more intricate than that and something that faced all visual artists at the time, not only photographers. Certainly, our world opened up – and not only politically. We began to think differently about ourselves, our past and how it had been narrated. There was a new complexity to image making; an investigation into other themes, modes and languages, as well as more self-reflexivity in the work of that time, all of which previously had not seemed possible – and this links to your point about the 1990s being the “identity decade”. Also, prior to democracy and particularly during the 1980s, there was a strong sense of “collectivity” in the way artists and photographers positioned themselves and how they worked; the imperatives were clear-cut and unambiguous – as was the language of image making. And photography was the domain of social documentary. There was little ambivalence about this; it was a “weapon of the struggle” and its business was advocacy – exposing the evils of apartheid.
And there were other new things in the 1990s. We became part of an international art world and this expanded the field; remember the 1995 and 1997 Johannesburg Biennials and the surge of photography and video that followed? Suddenly, or so it seemed, photography had entered the realm of art. I think that moment had quite a profound effect on photography here and sometimes I wonder whether the splintering you speak of wasn?t perhaps more an anxiety that photography might lose its coherence, the distinctiveness of its project and simply be absorbed into the broader practice of contemporary art – because that’s really what changed here then. If you consider photography during the apartheid years, its efficacy and its power was largely tied up in its deliverance of an unequivocal and (seemingly) unmediated “truth”; we could “rely” on the image and we understood our world as much in terms of the conventions of social documentary – its explicit black and white clarity – as we did through its subjects.

Peter McKenzie: I think to say that after 1994 photography “splintered” is to simply that there was some kind of cohesiveness in what photographers were doing and saying during the apartheid years. I’m thinking more of the 1970s and 1980s here. At the one extreme there were those, mostly white photographers, who were at apartheid’s technical colleges, universities, art schools, alongside those who were members of the almost exclusively white Professional Photographers of South Africa organisation unaffected or unconcerned about the issues of the day. On the other hand, the socially engaged, “committed” photographers, professionals and free-lancers were a fairly disparate lot too. There were the shooters like the Bang-Bang Club, locals working for the “wires” and the South African media, the Drumphotographers and those working in progressive structures like Afrapix and others. The result was a very diverse picture or photograph of the country as these photographers brought their own aims, objectives and professional imperatives to the situation, some ardently in search of the Pulitzer winning photo of the man or woman with the burning tire around their necks. Consequently, there were, to consumers of these images both locally and internationally, confusing truths about the realities of the struggle for democracy and freedom. The photographs were mostly sensational, voyeuristic and dehumanising and soon after its inception Afrapix made a conscious decision to show the more humane side of struggle, the resilience of revolution and the dignity of organisation and resistance. […]

Text feature in Camera Austria International 100/2007, pp. 130–135.

JOHN FLEETWOOD

Market Photo Workshop. Strategies towards Photography Training

[…] The legacy of Apartheid has left many different challenges for training in a post election South Africa that the current government continues to struggle with: there are huge discrepancies. […] From a social condition that is fractured in its distribution of resources there has been the development of a new black middle class since the 1994 election. This has not inspired a rural economy that is steadily growing poorer. Neither has it successfully addressed the challenges around resources for education. But it has also given rise to a new generation with aspirations to move forward with determination; a drive to revisit the past to claim a real history; participate and play within global inclusion; and to construct and deconstruct belonging, identity and self worth.
The organic developments of methodologies of training at the Photo Workshop react to the above; addressing current needs, reinventing itself around a continually shifting society. […]
The curriculum is driven by technical and practical knowledge and skills, both digital and analogue, professional practice – that assist students with the skills needed in entering a professional working environment – and visual literacy to understand the relationship between photography, other media, visual culture, and history. […]
Projects are chosen to align students’ thinking with an awareness of society that describes and creates a background to their photography practice. The Photo Workshop also operates in this historical and current context, and has continuously expressed itself critically as an agent of change through choice of project, subject matter and partnerships. Outreach projects engage with marginalised (often rural) communities and neglected sectors of society. Projects are chosen to address problematic social conditions such as poverty, HIV-AIDS, violence against women, xenophobia, and education. In many cases participatory photography projects are used to address these issues. Students engage in a variety of levels with these projects; often as photographers; as facilitators; as trainers and as logistics organisers. These projects drive a heightened pace to a practical level of understanding photography and visual literacy.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 100/2007, pp. 136–137.