Exhibition Invite

This exhibition, the culmination of a series of photographs made between 2012 and 2017, embodies the period of grief, mourning and adjustment prior to and for several years after the passing of my mother. While my process was driven initially by a motivation to come to terms with this specific loss, this body of work also reflects on notions of loss associated with the passage of time.

 ‘Windrift’, the name of my childhood home, refers to the relentless winds that batter the suburb of Pinelands. The exhibition explores the complexity of suburbia where ideas of life as comfortable, clean and ordered easily slip into discomfit, sadness and perhaps even failure and unrealized expectations. Yet, despite the malaise associated with suburbia, it is nevertheless ‘home’.

Starting from the premise that photography, by its nature, objectifies, I consider that in an autobiographical mode of photographing, where subject and object merge, objectification is lessened. In this way photographs may open up a space of encounter and thus enable an interconnection between people.

Cafe Ganesh, Observatory, Cape Town - turns 20 - one of the reasons I returned to SA 19 years ago!!!

Poetry in the Township. Natalie Payne

Johannesburg is a rough, tough, brutish sort of city that has its own particular beauty and a very raw energy that I love.

Images by Natalie Payne - Interview by Teo J. Babini 

 

http://www.citizenbrooklyn.com/topics/art/poetry-in-the-township-natalie-payne/

quiet photography

Learning from teaching

 Teaching might teach me something - I tell my students if you start a blog you must post regularly, so I will try doing the same.

I found my old photograph albums gathering mold in the corner of a cupboard. These are my very first photos (taken in 1975!!!) I see I am still doing pretty much the same kind of thing, after doing all sorts of other things - I have come full circle, once again.

Cape Town Month of Photography MOP6

The Roodepoort Photography Project

http://wsoa.wits.ac.za/history-of-art/2014/03/20/roodepoort-photography-project/

BACKGROUND

The Roodepoort Photography Project brings together a group of young and emerging photographers into a series of visual engagements with Middle Classing in Roodepoort, an innovative research project by the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) that explores Roodepoort as a manifestation of new social formations in contemporary South Africa. In Middle Classing in Roodepoort,[1] Ivor Chipkin suggests that to see spaces like Roodepoort as simply a ‘middle class’ phenomenon (or worse, another artefact of ‘globalisation’) is to obscure their social significance. Townhouse complexes in Roodepoort constitute spaces of horizontal modernity, to paraphrase an idea from Carlos Forment. In other words, they are sites where the city, where order and rule are being constituted from below. These are certainly not spaces where violence is absent. They are sometimes, we shall see, oppressive enclosures. Yet their violence is of a different quality, not to mention quantity, to that of apartheid or of colonialism. Therein lies the innovation of the Roodepoort complexes. They are spaces of order, law and justification in response to and amidst the still-colonial form of South African society.

PROJECT

From 2013-2014 the Roodepoort Photography Project will bring together a group of young and emerging photographers into a series of orientation workshops, week-long photo shoots, and critical reflections, culminating in the publication of a book in 2015. The participating photographers include students and graduates from the Wits School of Arts, Market Photo Workshop and International Center of Photography: Melissa Bennett, Nocebo Bucibo, Lisa King, Mack Magagane, Michelle Monareng, Shogan Naidoo, Musa Nxumalo, Natalie Payne, Paul Samuels, Bianca van Heerden and Alexia Webster.