Johannesburg Circa Now (2004)

Johannesburg Circa Now is about photography and the city. We have both spent the last number of years working on projects that engage with photography, public space, and a range of cultural initiatives in the inner city of Johannesburg. We also share an interest in photography’s relation to the real; how photographs inflect and mediate our experience of ourselves in the world.

The idea began with a discussion about our more recent bodies of work. And although these have been largely situated in relatively distinct contexts, we discovered that there were interesting links and common ground between us, particularly with regard to our projects in the complex and contradictory environment that is the inner city. This led to a thought about what could happen in a coming together of our two projects.

Jo had spent the last number of years documenting Johannesburg’s transforming inner city and through Terry’s art practise and her work in media and social communications she had become deeply interested in the shifting demographics of this fractured city. Jo’s emphasis on the built environment seemed a nice complement to Terry’s engagement with the specific conditions of place and her interest in people and their circumstances, their stories, and the social history of Johannesburg.

We were both curious about what is already there. We had been looking at the physical world of the city and its circumstances, and at many of its fragmented and contradictory systems of information, culture, movement and economy.

The Johannesburg Art Gallery located as it is in Joubert Park has an extremely disjunctive relationship with the contemporary urban culture that surrounds it and seemed emblematic of much of the exploration of our work, and therefore an appropriate venue for an exhibition, which engaged with the disjunction of both cultural spaces and lived experience.

Inevitably, while Johannesburg Circa Now started with our independent bodies of work and an idea for a collaborative project that would mark a ‘meeting point’ between them, we ended up with a much larger and more layered project, one that effectively incorporated three major components: an exhibition, an interactive public project, and a catalogue publication that incorporates contributions from writers, architects, photographers and visual artists to extend our focus beyond the parameters delineated by the exhibition space.

The Exhibition

As we noted earlier, the contexts that we work in have largely shaped our artistic activities. And while they may be informed by different conditions and dynamics, what these practices do share is a commitment to interaction and collaboration. As we developed the project, we realised that underpinning our individual and collective work was a critical set of relations, affiliations and connections to other practitioners that inflected what we were now thinking and doing. Consequently, the exhibition expanded beyond the original scope of a joint exhibition to include the work of photographers at the Market Photo Workshop and the Joubert Park Photographers Association, as well as the entire production of the public project.

Terry has worked with the park photographers since 2001. Her collaboration with them for this project included documenting their histories and present circumstances and collating the many hundreds of photographs unclaimed by their clients over the past several years. Their photographs, juxtaposed with paintings selected from the gallery’s Foundation Collection, formed part of her installation in the gallery space.

When invited to teach at the Market Photo Workshop in May 2003, Jo met with a group of students who were photographing in the inner city and who also expressed their interest in participating in the project: Zola Gule, Lwazi Hlope, Andile Komanisi, Lebohang Mashiloane, Sabelo Mlangeni, Nhlanhla Mngadi and Siphiwe Zwane. With the support of the Market Photo Workshop, the project shifted its focus, and each photographer produced a series of images for the exhibition that explored a specific aspect of life and work in the inner city.

This more multi-faceted spread of works, installations and activities meant we had to rethink the curatorial imperatives and dynamics of the exhibition. We found that we were now working in a large group; in a space where the ‘thing’ of art is as much about the fluidity of relationships, exchanges, and process as it is about the material object. But it was also, in some ways a risky undertaking – how would we balance the indeterminacy of such an open-ended endeavour with the necessity of an end that requires a coherent object? And where notions of authority, authorship, control and responsibility - not to mention questions of value and what constitutes art and what doesn’t - are up for grabs and subject to negotiation?

As Johannesburg Circa Now evolved, our challenge was to find a way to construct the conditions within which the range of practice, expertise and experience – all with somewhat differing intentions and even towards different ends – could be integrated.

The Public Project

When thinking about inviting the public to participate in this project, we wanted something that went beyond the usual ‘walkabout / talkabout’ programme This part of the project was designed in collaboration with the Curriculum Development Project and the Wits School of Arts (the CDP/WSOA ‘Artists in Schools’ Partnership Project) and the Imbali Visual Literacy Project. A group of project assistants - young photographers, artists and art students – facilitated a programme of regular workshops throughout the 3 months our exhibition ran, for teachers and learners from more than thirty schools, as well as open sessions with the general public.

We wanted visitors to the exhibition to be able to register their contribution and response to the exhibition in a material way, in the actual exhibition space alongside the other works on show. And, with regard to the diverse range of visitors we expected at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, we had to find a process that would be accessible to all. We also wanted it to be playful!

We installed a photo studio into the exhibition space, with a selection of backdrops and props, lights, a camera and a printer. During these sessions, visitors to the exhibition had the opportunity to explore how they wished to represent themselves through photographic self-portraits accompanied by short texts. The response to these workshops was diverse, moving and provocative. Pinned up on the walls of the gallery, this wall of portraits continued to grow during the course of the exhibition. While some participants performed elaborately staged fantasies or somebody completely outside of their realm of experience, others took the process more seriously, revealing not truth (of course), but rather, for that moment anyway, a certain sort of self-knowledge and narrative of identity.

The Book

The book endeavours to bring the various parts of Johannesburg Circa Now together and to locate these within a wider experience of photography and the city.

A more basic purpose was to consolidate and document the exhibition and the public project. In this book we have compiled a selection of photographs drawn from the project, accompanied by essays and short texts by many of the project’s participants, facilitators, and collaborators.

But equally importantly, we wanted to invite other ways of perceiving and reflecting on the city and photography. In addition to commissioned essays about the city, photography and our work, and photographs by invited photographers, this book incorporates a series of texts written in response to photographic images. Here we asked contributors to choose a photograph, one that for whatever reason fascinated, compelled or provoked them. But also, an image that had some connection to - even if oblique or obscure - to growing up, living in, or passing through Johannesburg. Contributors include Rory Bester, Sean O’Toole, Ruth Rosengarten, Meinda Silverman and Msizi Myeza, David Goldblatt, Phaswane Mpe, Jay Pather, Ruth Motau, Ivan Vladislavic, Ingrid De Kok, Antjie Krog, Penny Sipois, Santu Mofokeng, David Andrew and Stephen Hobbs.

Altogether the texts included in this book are a way into the work of Johannesburg Circa Now, which at its heart was about making material lived experience; a space through which to speak something of our individual and collective responses to living in this place at this time. And while there are gaps here, many things left out, we wanted to work with photography in such a way as to activate a sense of the inter-connectedness of things. The photograph marks a point in a story, one from which we can then conjure our own narratives. Here we can make of the photograph, or rather with it, an encounter that radiates both inwards into our private worlds of association and experience and outwards, back into the myriad worlds captured within the space of this city.

Text © Terry Kurgan and Jo Ractliffe, 2004.