Emile Ebrahim Kelly

Jackie Heyns - District Six in the heyday - from the book 'District Six Revisited'

District Six lies just south east of Cape Town city centre, a conspicuous hole in the landscape. It’s a place in which I have family history, I expect the same is true for most people with Cape Town roots. In the early 19th Century the area had been known as Zonnebloem Farming Estate, but the borders of Cape Town were expanding and in 1867 it became the ‘Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town’. By all accounts District Six was a lively place, a vibrant mix of people and cultures. Being so close to the docks made the area a gateway to the city, and although the population was mainly coloured/cape Malay/black, other races could also be found there, from Irish and Portuguese sailors to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia. For the residents of District Six, it was the only place to be. The home of Jazz and the heartbeat of the city. The vibrancy of District Six is described famously by Richard Rive, a childhood friend of my Grandmother, in the novel ‘Buckingham Palace, District Six‘.

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Dug out some photographs from my last trip to Cape Town in December 2007. They weren’t taken with this project, or any other project, in mind. My approach just a year and a half ago was different. Hopefully that’s progression!

First up, some people I met:

Belinda

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I will make separate trips to South Africa before, during and after the Football World Cup in 2010, conducting interviews and making photographs. I will use the event, and football in general, as a backdrop for the project, which will be an exploration of the social, political, cultural and economic condition of South Africa. My intention is to use the World Cup as an entry point, a means of making contacts from which engaging threads will emerge.

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An essay I wrote recently, not directly about this project, but i hope it will provide some insight into my approach to making images:

- For the purpose of this essay I will define the ‘documentary’ photographer as someone who makes photographs that explore the social and political condition of the world, with the gallery, books, dedicated websites and magazines as the intended destination for the images. I would like to make clear that I see a distinction between this and the working news photographer, who covers whichever stories are currently in the press in order to sell to news outlets; a job that seems increasingly threatened by the widespread use of camera phones and other imaging devices.

If “every photograph involves a certain degree of abstraction from the three dimensional fabric of the world”, one might question where this leaves the ‘documentary’ photographer. It seems this area of practice is underpinned by a desire to represent the world in the most ‘realistic’, or least ‘abstract’, way possible. Whilst a large proportion of photographers working in a ‘documentary’ way no longer claim to be presenting objective facts about the world, most still adhere to the traditional visual language of ‘documentary’ photography.

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