Notes

Inside Edition is the first in a series of photographic portfolios to be published by Goodman Gallery Editions. This selection of photographs suggests a variety of approaches and methodologies, as well as a range of influences and concerns amongst the nine photographers represented.

Photography, more than any other medium in the visual arts, has been, in many ways, burdened with truth.  It has always been required to represent, but more than that, to show how things are in the world.  Faith in the camera’s veracity, in its ability to capture images of the world, meant that it was indispensible to the loose, disparate, and motley army of journalists and artists determined to confront the harshness and complexity of the apartheid state prior to 1994.  Photography in South Africa, therefore, has grappled not only with the history of the country, but also with its own history, a history of form, as well as of deeply political subject matter.

In the last decade-and-a-half, however, it has finally seemed possible that photography in the South African context might be let loose a little, might explore new genres within the medium, and give the photographer an entirely different set of choices in relation to both form and content.  The transformation of the political landscape has indeed meant a softening of the parameters within which many South African photographers once worked and, concomitantly, a greater degree of exploration of the potential of the photographic medium.

We see this exploration in the work of the nine photographers represented in Inside Edition.  The photographers work within and transform the familiar genres of landscape or portraiture in ways that suggest a setting aside of the constraints of those genres.  The works present not only a variety of South African experiences and scenes, but also a number of ways in which experience might be mediated by photography.  In some instances, the mediation of experience is a direct engagement with history of place, but in others, history is only glancingly referred to in favour of character, and in still others, neither history nor character take precedence.  Rather, the emphasis is on a moment or a mood, not entirely divorced from history – since all of the nine photographers are keenly aware of the context out of which their work flows – but transcending, translating, perhaps even deconstructing the historical moment that has traditionally been the raison d’être of the photograph.

What we have represented in Inside Edition are ironists or visual skeptics who offer reflection upon the medium as their primary interest rather than story characters, or subject matter;  portraitists who have stripped away all of the accoutrements of identity, or added costume, disguise, and performance to the genre;  and finally visual archivists who use the camera to record the accretions of memory and history.