Park Pictures (2004)

Joubert Park is surrounded by what was once a thriving retail and business centre for the city’s white middle class, abandoned in the early nineteen-eighties for the suburbs, with their decentralized malls and business parks. In today’s inner city, African immigrants, refugees, poor and working-class South Africans now occupy derelict apartment and hi-jacked office buildings. Living quarters are typically dense, and often without electricity, sanitation and water. The park offers breathing space and respite.

The park is also the working environment of a large community of street photographers, many of whom have spent their entire working lives operating from an inviolably fixed working position. Several of the photographers have worked from their spot in the park for upwards of 30 years. They hope to attract passers-by who can pay them for their services, and use the scenic attractions of the park as backdrops that signal their subject’s having ‘made good’ and established themselves in a city that has newly become home.

The photographers constitute a complex and highly organized informal business sector—the principal economy of the park—and operate according to their own set of rules, exchanges and regulations. They all have their roots elsewhere and have migrated to Johannesburg to find work. The position each person occupies is sacred, and the process whereby they came to work as a photographer in the park is immensely complicated and dependent upon far-reaching networks and flows of complicity, cooperation, family and other affiliation. The right to occupy a particular bench, a large rock on the grass, a low wall perch along a cobbled pathway is often purchased or negotiated as far away from the inner city of Johannesburg as a rural village in Mozambique or Zimbabwe.

Park Pictures comprises portraits that I made of each photographer, a large aerial map of the park and surrounding precinct, marking their fixed positions, and then lastly, many hundreds of their photographs unclaimed by their clients. The photographers charge their clients 50% of the fee on the day that they take the photograph, issue a receipt, and are paid the other half upon collection. At least half the printed photographs are never claimed, and they agreed to let me buy a large number of these unclaimed photographs to use in the work, as if I were the missing client.

Their photographs resonate with the paradoxical issues surrounding photographic representation and performance. There’s the distinct and playful language of the pose, and many of the park photographers’ customers unconsciously imitate these conventions. The photographs reveal various forms of role-playing enacted by clients in impromptu performances of the self—a man crouches for action and aims a pistol; another presents himself for depiction in tribal animal skins, and a woman presents a thoughtful profile view, chin tucked into her hand, to a close up lens. These, in turn, jostle with representations more pointedly designed to consolidate social and familial relationships, proud mothers with children, young lovers embracing.  We see people performing in the hope that the photographer will recognize who it is that they would like to be. The park photographers’ work is also that of making these vectors of desire material, of rendering them visible.

Each photographer-archivist carries around, as a matter of course, a huge number of still-to-be-claimed photographs. Looking through their bags, and in some cases stored boxes, of unclaimed or rejected photographs, which sometimes go back many years, it is very interesting to see the difference between who they were photographing ten, fifteen, twenty years ago and who they are photographing now. Holding onto orphaned photographs in trust, as an extension of their daily recurring labour, they have inadvertently created an informal ‘social history’ archive that documents the shifting demographics and transformation of this fragmented city.

Postscript

This project, and these words above date back to 2005. The buildings around the park are even more neglected, over-populated and chaotic. Following global trends, the cell phone habits of South Africans have changed dramatically, as smartphones, mobile applications and the mobile Internet have entered the mainstream. Curious, to see how this change may have impacted upon the park photographers trade, I made a recent visit to Joubert Park.

There were now almost 50 photographers working out of the park. 15 of those are members of the original group of 40 who worked with me in 2005, and they are still there in January 2022, occupying exactly the same positions! Although they have now all made the shift from film to digital—in 2005 this was about 50/50—they still carry around bags of unclaimed photographs. They complain a lot about how cell phone technology has interfered with their business, and that people who have smartphones can now themselves send images to their loved ones far away. To compensate for this loss of business, they have innovated something they call “Same Time” which means that the majority of them now own portable printers that they carry around in their bags, and to incentivise clients to commission their portraits, they offer to print immediately. Another entrepreneurial innovation that seems to work is that several of them have invested in the sort of cameras and printers needed to make photographs for identity documents and passports; and in this there appears to be a roaring turnover.

Terry Kurgan
Johannesburg
January 2023

To view a more comprehensive Photo-Essay, see here: This essay was included in the book Unfixed: Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art, edited by Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy, published by JAPSAM Books, Netherlands 2012.