04/08/2007 15:38 - (SA)
Picture this: Celebrating artistic women
Now in its sixth year, the annual Women in Arts Festival provides a fresh take on photography, dance and music. NOKUTHULA MAZIBUKO spoke to some of the participating artists
Ingrid Masondo, acclaimed feminist photographer and co-curator of the Face Her exhibition, is a reluctant role model. For the exhibition – part of the sixth Women in Arts Festival – Masondo has put together a range of evocative photographs by present and past Market Photo Workshop students. Masondo waxes lyrical about the freshness of the work that will be on show, but shies away from taking props for training and inspiring the young photographers that are her charges.
The provocative spirit of the exhibition is described by critic Pumla Dineo Gqola in the accompanying catalogue as one that challenges the eye to reconsider the many faces of women, and represents “the visual languages that we inherit from celebrated young and more established photographers in the South African arts landscape, among them Zanele Muholi and Lolo Veleko”.
Masondo is a contemporary – and former classmate – of Muholi and Veleko’s at the Photo Workshop. Together they developed a visual language that represented the sensuality and beauty of black women’s bodies in ways not previously seen. Masondo admits, though, that it can be argued that her work – and that of Muholi and Veleko’s – opened up important representational spaces for black women to take more authentic and interesting pictures of one another. Masondo, though careful not to overburden the younger photographers, says: “Zanele, Lolo and I are working on the same issues in very different ways. But we’re also slightly older than a lot of people who are participating in this exhibition. I don’t see that much of an obsession with bodies in this group of photographers and I think that’s great.”
Given the wide scope of how the 20 young photographers chosen for the Face Her exhibition interpreted the title, Masondo says it wasn’t easy for her and co-curators Lester Adams and Rita Portenza, to pick appropriate images. Aside from the pictures having to be both technically and creatively sound, they also had to work as a collection. During their first round of selections, Masondo, Adams and Portenza chose images without knowing who the photographers were so as not to be biased. Naturally, they found they liked a lot of the same images, but also disagreed and haggled over some.
Masondo’s view of the work is that young people are playing around with new languages to assert and challenge society to “face” their presence. They are not content to let big media companies and businesses speak on their behalf.
“The exhibition touches on many things. Some of them really light and playful… about games and people, documenting whatever’s around. Sometimes [young] people are obsessed with how they’re represented. They’re looking at ads by Lovelife, Levis or whatever and they want to change that. Young people coming from the township aren’t often represented the way they want to be represented. Not that there is a collective identity as such, but their struggle is for as many of them as possible to express themselves and have that expression out there in whatever way so that we have a variety, a multiplicity of these expressions, instead of one that’s mostly guided by advertisers.”
One of the young photographers on show, Kgauhelo Hlaka, says she loves photographing fashion shows and the arts, but is irritated by how female models are forever in a state of semi-nudity.
Hence, her appreciation of local clothing labels like Darkie, which dresses the female form beautifully and sensually, minus the strip tease. Hlaka’s contribution to the Face Her exhibition is a brilliantly framed picture of a group of female models in a Darkie fashion show, dressed in colourful blankets in the style of baSotho women. Beneath the blankets they don trendy, urban denim. Hlaka says she tends to photograph a lot of ordinary women who are somehow doing artistic work. She is concerned that many images of black women show them as either very poor or very rich B.E.E. types – nothing in between. She wants to show women who are still becoming. “Like ordinary women who have little extraordinary bits in their lives,” says Hlaka.
“They don’t have a huge tender or anything like that. But they have little extraordinary moments in their lives. And I find that I want to capture those moments because I feel like we’re in such a rush to be at the top but the journey there is not captured. It’s just the before and after. But I want this in-between.”
Another young photographer in the exhibition, Musa Nxumalo, says his work is about the effect music has on people. His portraits depict two young women: one listens to punk rock (and wears the black clothes and scowl to prove it) and the other is a hip-hop skateboarder (she sits astride a chair, in her brightly coloured hip-hop attire). Nxumalo says it’s interesting that the two women are considered lesbian because of the way they dress (baggy jeans, caps) and because of the freedom and individuality with which they carry themselves.
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