Something has clicked in the appreciation of art and documentary photography in South Africa. Exhibitions, festivals and galleries devoted to the medium abound, and the moment promises to last far longer than 125th of a second.
How close, photographers and gallerists are wondering, are South Africans to hanging their walls with scenes caught by the camera alongside, or even instead of, paintings? And are those who might do so art lovers or profit seekers?
“Some people understand buying photography as an investment — and then there are people looking for nice things to put on their walls. It’s a great conversation,” photographer Sean Furlonger tells the FM.
“People get excited when they hear that what they have bought could gain in value, but the nice thing is that they are genuinely curious and want it because they enjoy it rather than trying to make more money off it.”
Furlonger and his father, renowned fashion photographer Gavin Furlonger, own and run Gallery F in Cape Town. It was established in 2002 and is dedicated to photography. The gallery sells the work of, among many, David Goldblatt, and represents Jodi Bieber. It’s also on a mission to preserve and protect South Africa’s analogue photography history: its archive holds more than 1-million negatives.
Gallery F knows its way around the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. This year it was also at FNB Art Joburg, which launched its photography section, GIF, in 2024 with seven exhibitors. A year later there were five. Gallery F were the only takers this year. Did that mean the art form was losing ground at the Joburg event?
“Photography remains popular, but dedicating a section to it became difficult as it is carried by most galleries anyway,” says FNB Art Joburg founder and owner Mandla Sibeko.
That looks like a dark cloud. But its lining is sterling silver: art dealers have spotted South Africans’ growing appetite for photography.
Certainly, we’re spoilt for choice. Landscapes, wildlife, portraiture, fashion, music, art; it’s all there. It has been for a long time. Because as bad as apartheid was for every aspect of millions of lives, it was good for photography.
A powerful picture
From Ernest Cole’s searing and seminal 1967 book House of Bondage to Sam Nzimba’s iconic image of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dying Hector Pieterson on June 16, 1976 to the powerful bodies of work produced over decades by Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng, South Africa’s photographers kept shooting through the shooting.
They haven’t stopped. The August 2012 Marikana massacre was cast into our memories indelibly by the pictures of it. James Oatway’s photographs of the xenophobic murder of Emmanuel Sithole in Alexandra in April 2015 were key to the culprits being caught and convicted.
There’s much more where that came from. What We Do Not See, a major Goldblatt exhibition in what would have been his 95th year, curated by his daughter Brenda Goldblatt, is on at the Wits Art Museum in Joburg until October 24.
Joburg was the centre of Goldblatt’s focus. Accordingly the show includes work by nine of the city’s most notable contemporary painters of light and freezers of moments: Bieber, Jabulani Dhlamini, Gulshan Khan, Mark Lewis, Tshepiso Mazibuko, Madoda Mkhobeni, Sabelo Mlangeni, Jo Ractliffe and Lindokuhle Sobekwa.
Jimi Matthews’ From District Six to Palestine, which documents displacement in both places, is at Museum Africa in Joburg until October 31. There’s also always something on at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in Joburg. It opened its doors in September last year, having grown out of Ballen’s Inside Out Centre for the Arts.
In the Mother City, the second edition of the Cape Town Photography Festival sprawled all over the city for most of September. The work of more than 160 photographers — twice as many as at last year’s inaugural event — was displayed in 40 spaces. There were workshops, discussions, film screenings and guided walks.
Then, inland from that, the Barrydale Analog [sic] Photo Festival is due to transform the Western Cape hamlet from bohemian bolthole to a clamour of and for culture for the sixth consecutive year in December.
Print charming
Not much more than 100m of Shortmarket Street in Cape Town separates Gallery F from Ultraviolet, another photography-only space.
It opened in August last year and snagged significant attention in February by hanging its walls with 40 works in an exhibition titled Pretty Boy. The pictures, some of them self-portraits, were made from 1983 to 1989 by acclaimed supermodel turned photographer Josie Borain.
So many notable photobooks have come out of South Africa that a publication billing itself as “the first sustained study of the South African photobook” is out. Sean O’Toole’s Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook! was published in May this year. Fun fact: O’Toole house sat for Goldblatt.
There’s so much photography about that you can’t turn around without bumping into a picture frame or someone pointing a camera. And not only in this country. Kodak filed for bankruptcy 14 years ago. Now the company is working through a backlog of orders for rolls of film. What is going on?
“The advent of camera phones has put an artistic tool in everyone’s pocket,” says Dylan Culhane, who owns and runs Ultraviolet. “So it makes sense that photography is trickling into public consciousness more than ever. The medium is so much a part of our daily life.
“As that happens, there are going to be people who embrace it as an art form, which is how it emerged in the first place: artists would paint portraits or landscapes, then suddenly the camera came along and could do that.”
Having a decentish camera in our pocket has made us believe we are photographers. Or as good at taking pictures as photographers are. We’re not. We need photographers — and photography — more than ever.
