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COMING SOON TO - BRISBANE POWERHOUSE ARTS - APRIL 8 - MAY 3 2010
THEN & NOW - eight South African photographers
Collected by Paul Weinberg
The collection Then & Now
is an outcome of a project of the same name that was initiated and
curated by Paul Weinberg. The project comprises an exhibition, which
was launched in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, South Africa, on 10
September 2007; a video documentary made by Roger Lucy of E.tv,
comprising interviews with the eight contributing photographers; and a
limited edition publication of the collection, published by Highveld
Press, Johannesburg (that sold out within three months, reprinted in 2008).
Southern Exchange, Sydney, is pleased to represent Then & Now in Australasia and welcomes expressions of interest from museums and galleries who would like to explore opportunities to present this important collection.
ABOUT THE PROJECT AND THE COLLECTION
Spanning some fifty years to the
present, Then & Now draws together a
culturally and artistically significant body of work by some of the
most celebrated and respected photographers practicing in South Africa
today:
- David Goldblatt
- George Hallett
- Eric Miller
- Cedric Nunn
- Guy Tillim
- Paul Weinberg
- Graeme Williams
- Giselle Wulfsohn.
Each of the photographers has
contributed twenty prints, ten made under apartheid and ten made during
the post-apartheid period. The works are shot in both black and white
and colour, in a variety of formats, and are produced as digital prints on archival Hahnmuhle paper.
The project that has enabled this important collection to be drawn together, was funded by the
Conference, Workshop and Cultural Initiative (CWCI) Fund, a European
Union-South Africa Program, and the Rare Book, Manuscripts, and Special
Collections Library at Duke University in the United States. The
project was facilitated by Rhodes University, South Africa.
Following the South African 2007 launch of Then & Now
at the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, the collection has been exhibited at
the Durban Art Gallery, was featured during the month of
photography in October in Cape Town, 2007 and in 2008 toured to Johannesburg and Pretoria. Internationally, since the collections launch at Duke University (March 2008), it has been presented at the Ghent Festival in Belgium in July 2008, at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne in 2009, numerous venues in Scandinavia throughout 2009. In April 2010 the collection will be presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse Museum coinciding with the Queensland Month of Photography.
Anthea Fawcett, from Southern
Exchange, Sydney, has enjoyed a close association with South Africa and
the University of Cape Town since 2000. Southern Exchange was
established in 2006 to facilitate cultural exchange between Australia,
South Africa and North Asia and is pleased to represent Then & Now in Australasia.
In 2008 Paul Weinberg was
appointed Curator of the Archive, Film and Photography, at the Centre
for Curating the Archive, Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape
Town. Then & Now is one of several innovative projects that
Paul is currently progressing to foster enhanced recognition of South
Africa ’s visual culture and history.
We hope you will enjoy Then & Now. For further information about the collection, the photographers and their work, please contact:
Anthea Fawcett, Southern Exchange
(Southern Exchange
acknowledges and thanks Paul Weinberg and the Highveld Press for the
right to reproduce materials from the Then & Now project, and the
publication Then & Now - eight south african photographers, Highveld Press, Johannesburg, 2007.)
INTRODUCTION - THEN & NOW
Then & Now – eight South African photographers
is a major collection of works by eight photographers who have worked
and continue to work in two highly distinctive periods in South African
history: before and after its transition to democracy.
The collection provides insight
into the personal, intellectual and photographic journeys that each
contributor has traveled as they have witnessed, recorded and lived
through remarkable times both past and present, then and now.
Together, the works provide a
compelling historical, cultural and artistic record of the times and of
the contribution of documentary photographers to it. It is an
invaluable record from photographers spanning a period of over 50 years
to the present. Further, the collection and its narratives encourage
dialogue and reflection on the changing roles, perspectives and
aesthetic approaches adopted by photographers in today’s South Africa .
All of the photographers in Then & Now
were selected for the project because, having been active in the
Struggle period, they still work with a commitment to political – or
rather, social – developments in South Africa or elsewhere on the
continent. Curator and contributor Paul Weinberg refers to the project
(of which this collection is part):
as something of a family
gathering – a family with a shared history which has sought to
understand South Africa’s changes, contradictions, and complexities,
both as a community and as individuals".
Each of the eight photographers
included in this collection were associated with the collective
photography movement in the turbulent 1980s – a time that saw the
effective outlawing of photography of ‘any unrest or security action’.
All contributors to Then & Now,
with the exception of David Goldblatt, were either members of, or
contributors to, Afrapix. Afrapix was a collective photo agency and
library that played an important role in documenting and communicating
the anti-apartheid struggle to local and international audiences. David
Goldblatt, while not a member of Afrapix, made a major contribution to
the collective movement by mentoring younger members and founding the
Market Photographic Workshop - a workshop that continues today to
provide young photographers from disadvantaged backgrounds with an
entry to photography.
The curatorial approach to the
collection was to invite each contributor to select twenty images which
exemplified their work during the two periods, with ten works from each
period.
The final selection of works is
one that includes a number of iconic, well known and much loved images
and the overall result is one that surprises.
As Weinberg observes,
The notion of ‘then and now’
that underpins this project conjures up the relatively simplistic
opposites of struggle and liberation; justice and injustice; war and
peace. The apartheid period gave us a simple construct that was easy to
respond to: humanity and inhumanity, for and against, black and white,
right and wrong. Of course while these juxtapositions remain
meaningful, our country and society are considerably more nuanced and
complex than this. Therefore, in the course of the project it emerged
that notions of ‘then’ and ‘now’ were not as clear as I had imagined at
the outset; besides the obvious disjunctures, many of the participants
also experience an important continuity between what they did then and
are doing now”.
For many South African who were
involved in the Struggle, the transition to democracy was,
paradoxically, both an enormous cause for celebration and the beginning
of an oft protracted period of personal crisis as individuals struggled
to find an equally potent ‘focus’ around which to organize their lives
and work.
While political documentary
photography predominated in the 1980s, when freedom came there was a
sense of loss, if not paralysis, by many who had worked in this field.
Conversely, the lifting of the cultural boycott in the new dispensation
allowed cultural exchange, and international curators and gallerists to
discover and promote the extraordinary range of creativity in the South
African art world, not least in photography. South African photography
has flourished in the post transition environment and is enjoying
international acclaim, with Guy Tillim and David Goldblatt at the
forefront of such recognition. This has fostered reflection, debate
and innovation within – and about – the contestable terrains of art
photography and documentary photography.
In recent years, all of the
photographers in this collection have enjoyed increasing national and
international recognition and have had their work shown in art
galleries and museums, whether as major retrospectives in South Africa
or overseas, or in themed exhibitions or group shows.
The deep veins of continuity that
Weinberg refers to, can be seen to be invigorated by a new spirit of
creative exploration in the work of each of the photographers
represented in Then & Now.
As many of the selected images
suggest, there is a sense of relief, a sense of letting go of many of
the strictures and disciplines imposed by the imperatives of Then and a welcoming of the freedom of Now to explore more diverse personal and social concerns and aesthetic directions.
Anthea Fawcett
Southern Exchange, Sydney
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