Emile Ebrahim Kelly

Did another shoot with my dad last week, and for the most part the photographs are rubbish, but I do like two and ironically they are the only ones that didn’t go to plan. The lighting I set up didn’t fire, creating a silhouette. They were the only two moments that felt like something was happening without being forced, which is why the flash didn’t fire; I was reacting instinctively to a moment that felt right and the flash hadn’t had time to re-charge. I had been really stuck with this project, feeling like my time restriction was forcing me into a contrived reaction to the archive photographs, but after a good tutorial/crit I feel I’ve made a breakthrough…

Vincent standing at the bedroom window

Continue reading »

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

Continue reading »

This set of photographs came out of a huge and ridiculously heavy book titled “NATAL”. They seem to document someone’s journey across Natal (or KwaZulu), although there’s no information about who that might be. What grabbed me was simply the craft involved, the prints in the book were of such high quality and the composition of some of them is awesome; there were certain photographs that reminded me of Joel Sternfeld. I had to make a massive on the spot edit because the book was so large that the scans cost about 6 times what I was expecting. Unfortunately, when the CD with the scans arrived, certain images I was sure I had chosen weren’t on it. There was one in particular that sticks in my memory: a landscape in a park or botanical gardens, with a small white boy standing awkwardly staring into the camera, it was very strange. Which was what i like about the images, clearly they don’t do much to break from typical colonialist photographs, but they had this strangeness to them. I don’t know if the selection I’ve ended up with here really gets that across though. Thoughts?

Click the images for large versions, the scans don’t really convey the initial impact of seeing the prints, but its important to see them in as much detail as possible.

"Field of Pineapples"

Continue reading »

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

Continue reading »