a lens into the potjie

In December 2010 and January 2011 I traveled to India. I had a backpack and my camera gear. I went with a friend of mine, an artist from Hermanus, Western Cape. We hurled ourselves into the sense-assaulting void, with our sensitivity directed towards imagery.

The still photograph, as with the painting, prides itself in its momentariness; it is a brief, unnatural freeze-frame of reality, it works phenomenologically: the photograph, despite the violence, smell and noise which surrounds the objects within it, returns to a state of ‘stillness’ and ‘silence’. It reaches out to the viewer, producing a kind of ‘thunder-struck effect, a form of suspense and phenomenal immobility’ which interrupts the world; a ‘freeze-frame effect in which the dizzying impact and magical eccentricity of the detail is seen.’ Thus, photography’s role is not necessarily to illustrate an event, but rather to be an event itself; revealing the singularity of an event’s details, where the object of the photograph obtains ‘the force of pure event’. These events however, run risk of falling into the repository of the exoticised gaze. By being a westerner, absolutely everything i saw could have been rendered interesting and necessary to capture. But why necessary? what was my intention? what was my agenda? what India was i trying to show to whom, and for what purposes exactly, other than it being totally "other" to what is familiar back home?

The answers to these questions is not as clear-cut as i would like them to be, and this blog, and these spaces, shall be a platform for me to try and work the conundrum out. Mostly, my images take on a documentary position - i was foreign, they were local. This binary of me vs them, familiar vs exotic is a tough space to navigate thro, especially when this is the fact of the matter. I thus tried to experiment with my positioning: i tried to render my position conceptual in the sense that i would try and represent what it is that i see thro different self-reflexive lenses. This is executed thro a mix of landscape photographs, permissible portraits, and street photographs, where i would take photos from my waist, without aiming properly, and without the subjects knowing they were being photographed.

The effect is an eclectic one. The landscapes were obviously totally designed frames by my eye and viewfinder. The portraits were as the subject sought fit to represent themselves, but i also dictated that frame by the position i assumed. The street scenes were then an exercise in a zen-like spontaneity: it was not voyeuristic and othering to me;

rather, it became a non-actional action, a non-guided blast into the abyss,

a lightning bolt into the void

a cast & retrieving,

where the the retrieving is sidelined by the vitality and energy of the casting,

a ruthless device which may capture the physical world of form in our absence.