Emile Ebrahim Kelly

I’m going on a road trip to Spain today and it got me thinking about the act of making photographs while traveling. I obviously feel an urge to photograph, but I also feel conflicted about this urge: who am I to try and create an insightful representation of a place which I’ll only be in for a matter of days? For me the obvious answer is to not even attempt to; I have to make the pictures about something else. My position as a foreigner passing through has to be central. My last couple of trips abroad have involved long journeys on sleeper trains, during which I started to play with taking photographs from the train window. You have this constantly changing landscape in front of you and the whole act feels like the traveling experience boiled down to its essence. Here’s a couple of examples:

Somewhere between Nairobi & Mombasa, Kenya, January 2009

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I was at the National Archives in Kew yesterday, starting to look at British involvement in South Africa through photographs. I found some fascinating images, but let me start by describing the process, because it really is an amazing experience. It takes a bit of work finding relevant looking stuff in their catalog, especially as the word “photographs” doesn’t seem to bring up many of the photographic collections. But with a bit of tinkering about and manually browsing from the odd starting point, you can find some quality stuff. I’m reading “Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa” by Martin Meredith at the moment (great book, I’m sure lots of posts will spring from it), and I’ve found a good thing to do is use events, places or people as your starting point for the searches; rather than just searching ‘South Africa Photographs’, which brings up hardly anything.

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Ajax Cape Town supporter flying the flag - December 2007

South Africa can feel football obsessed at times, obviously its not a big deal for everyone and I will be looking at this further within the project, but those who do follow the beautiful game pretty much live it and breathe it. One young member of my family, Saige, once cried his eyes out because Talia, his mum/my cousin, refused to officially change his name to Stephen Gerrard. That’s the kind of passion I’m talking about. The big English teams have huge followings, and it would be easy to ignore the South African league, but I was determined to experience it last time I was out there, so i persuaded my girlfriend, brother and a mate to come see Ajax Cape Town play Mamelodi Sundowns.

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