Young Player - Gebane, South Africa, April 2010
Me and Josh have got the above image in the the Foto8 Summer Show at HOST gallery. Launch party is on the 23rd and will be a laugh. Get yourself down there, its a ticket only thing.
Andre from Grassy Park, Cape Town - Click image for words
I have moved from the place we were staying and finally have reliable internet! Here’s some updates from the end of last week. Andre and William were at the Athlone fan park in the southern suburbs and Sipewe was in Imizamo Yethu township in Hout bay. I’m planning to shoot more in both places. More images and words to come tomorrow. Need bed now. E
William Wence from Cape Town - Click image for words
William Wence from Cape Town - Click image for words
Sipewe Cele from Durban, Imizamo Yethu Township, Cape Town - Click image for words
Hout Bay, Cape Town, April 2010
Click the image above to open a gallery of portraits. You can go left or right by clicking your mouse on the left/right side of the image, or you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard, or even N (next) and P (previous). The options are endless… Well, not endless, there’s just three. The colours on some images might be a bit off, but you’ve all probably got dodgy un-calibrated screens anyway, so what does it matter? Would love to hear what anyone thinks in the comments sections. A little bit of waffle and some out-takes below. Enjoy!
Gebane - South Africa
The ash cloud tried to hold us down, but we’re back! I was absolutely rubbish at blogging while I was in South Africa, so I’m going to do retrospective posts about the places we visited, accompanied by the images. I have already scanned all our negs, so those posts will start to appear soon. The image above is a little taster!
A couple weeks ago I shot some portraits with Vincent, my dad, who was going to be one of my South Africans living in Britain. The portraits aren’t particularly interesting and were never intended to be the final product, just a starting point onto which I will layer ideas for the next shoot. The plan was to get the format for my portraits finalised with him, then start arranging shoots/interviews with my other subjects. Since then I’ve hit a bit of a wall mentally, which is why I haven’t posted these up already. My problem is basically the time constraints on this mini-project, so I had to decide to either make very simple portraits with lots of subjects or narrow down my subjects in order to play more with the portrait. I have now decided on the latter and have changed the project to focus simply on my immediate family, all of whom have differing relationships with both South Africa and Britain. These portraits will be a response to the Griqualand photographs I found at the National Archives. This blog is supposed to document the entirety of my process, so despite my not liking them, here are a few of the results of that initial shoot (apologies about the slightly off-key colours):
Vincent at the park
In any photographic portrait there is a degree of power and control wielded by both photographer and subject, in thinking about how to address/play with this balance in my own portraiture I have been looking at photographers whose work I admire. Adam Bromberg & Oliver Chanarin’s ‘Ghetto’, a book full of individual stories from 12 ‘modern ghettos’ (gated communities), addresses this balance in many different ways. Here’s some examples:
Self portrait by Mario, 60 - Rene Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital, Cuba
To view the the Daily Dispatch Gallery from the beginning, click the link at the top. To jump to yesterdays dispatch, click the image. Todays dispatch will be in the post to the left and all of them can also be found by scrolling through the posts.
