Barnard Gallery presents Point of View – an exhibition of selected contemporary photography by established and emerging South African artists. There’s a cool elegance about this show,
A common term in photography, point of view implies the position from which the cameraman sees and sets the scene. It is a subjective term, acknowledging the dominance of a particular place, object, moment and space that for others, might go unnoticed. And with these choices come the essential questions that every artist and every viewer must ask: what is the significance of these people, places and objects? Why the dominant or centralised focus on one image over another? What conceptual, ideological and aesthetic decisions have been made to reach the point of framing and producing these images?
Instead of targeting works that exemplify photography’s traditional role as documentary or truth teller, curator Alastair Whitton has selected images that resound with multiple, metaphoric possibilities. They may evoke nostalgia or poignancy, like sand dunes blanketing a water slide at an abandoned municipal resort on an isolated beach, in the work of Sean Wilson from his series entitled Bayou Falso, much like moss eventually envelops, without completely choking, a tree trunk; or they might make surface references to ornithology as in Lien Botha’s Sociable Weaver’s Nest. Botha’s work transcends a re-presentation of nature. It invokes visual, textual and thematic associations of parenting, protection, rites of passage and community. Conversely, as opposed to nature in communion, other works might speak of alienation and dislocation, as in the work of Graeme Williams.
Few of the photographs in Point of View are peopled; even those which contain a human presence within the frame, such as Gary Van Wyk’s floating form, or Vanessa Cowling’s surfers and bathers, are not personalised portraits of a subject “captured” by the lens; rather, they are mnemonic tools, setting in motion narratives of journeys during which we contemplate the world through the ready-made picture frame of a car, in David Southwood’s work, for example; or catching the movement and spaces that occur between the main event, as in Ashley Walter’s divers; or immortalising objects that serve as talismen, triggers or symbolic catalysts of memory, such as the tricycle in Stephen Inggs photograph. And it is not simply the iconography that is of significance but the techniques employed to evoke intrigue, such as Alastair Whitton’s archival pigment prints on glass reminiscent of 19th century ambrotypes or the use of expired film in the work of Carla Erasmus to augment the surreality of the image. Then there are Svea Josephy’s dual depictions of Hanover Park – one of the gang-riddled ghettos of the Cape Flats – and its counterpart in Germany, an advanced, cosmopolitan city connecting major European centers.
In short, Point of View presents a non-stereotypical, archive of images and visual chronicles of what we care about, what we think about, how and to what we react, and who we are. It invites the formation of associations between disparate elements, signs, structures and through the choreography of nature, sparking ideas that resonate outside the picture-frame. Particularly when juxtaposed against each other, the images on display generate a discourse about personal memory, history, loss, desire and about photography’s role as art. They encourage us to interrogate the perceived connection to the physical world that photography evokes, in contrast to the status of painting as a “stand alone” product. But perhaps, most simply, they confirm the human impulse to make poetry out of impermanence – to keep alive that which ultimately changes, decays and dies.
Point of View: Contemporary South African Photography features work by Lien Botha, Stephen Inggs, David Southwood, Graeme Williams, Gary Van Wyk, Svea Josephy, Lindeka Qampi, Damon Hyland, Carla Erasmus, Vanessa Cowling, Sean Wilson, Alastair Whitton, Ashley Walters, Mia Couvaras, Leigh Bassingthwaighte, Marc Shoul
WHEN: until 29 August 2013
WHERE: Barnard Gallery, 55 Main Street, Newlands Tel 021 671 1553
