ZWELETHU MTHETHWA
Sugar Cane (2003-2007)
January 17 - March 9, 2012
Opening reception, Tuesday, January 17, 5-7 p.m.
Curator, Diego Cortez
This exhibit by South African artist Zwelethu Mthethwa is a modest but able reminder of the genius of Mthethwa's work, represented here by seven seminal photo works from his 2003-2007 Sugar Cane series. These works recall a moment when the artist came to grips with a critical question in contemporary photography: how to provide greater dignity and realism to his subjects than that afforded by the black-and-white documentary reportage as was prevalent during South Africa's historical transformation from apartheid to a free and open society.
Educated in a fine arts university program, Mthethwa had a background in painting, though he studied photography at the University of Cape Town. He was the first non-white admitted to the program. Later he would come to the United States on a Fulbright to study photography at RIT, Rochester.
In Cape Town, he studied with David Goldblatt, who became an important influence on his work, especially as Mthethwa sought to transcend the traps of pure documentary photography in order to find a stronger visual aesthetic. Mthethwa's work would later be compared to photo artists like Goldblatt, who use photography to make art that is closely linked with social narrative. The work of fellow South African Pieter Hugo and Brazilian Sebastião Salgado also comes to mind. Their strong visual sensibilities were able to help push documentary photography past its own limitations.
Mthethwa has said that the break from his early use of black-and-white to color images, in 1991, freed him from a limited vision of reality in which his subjects were made to "look poor," a vision that seemed inevitably to "portray poverty." While black-and-white documentary photography has often been attached to a political agenda, using color enabled Mthethwa to provide a greater sense of truth to his subjects, visualizing their own well-being, their happiness, their sense of pride, their true character as living beings.
Okwui Enwezor, former artistic director of both Dokumenta XI and the second Johannesburg Biennale, who has described Mthethwa's Sugar Cane series as "masterpieces that capture the complexity of the South African experience," has also asserted that "Black-and-white reportage was itself complicit in denying the indigent inhabitants of settlements like Crossroads any claim to subjecthood. It placed them within the status of news items: victims rather than persons, specimens instead of individuals."
Mthethwa: "My brother bought a farm in Umzinto, which is south of Durban. I went there to visit him and he showed me around the farm. I saw that the men harvesting the sugar cane were wearing long skirts and had fancy hairdos. Their wrists had pieces of cloth wrapped around them. They looked very funky to me. With the machetes they carry I saw samurai warriors. For me it is not strange for a black person to think of samurai warriors because of my history of images. It reminded me of my youth watching movies and reading comic books on weekends. The layering of the clothes also reminded me of the high fashion in Paris. I knew these were simply subjective insights. When I spoke with the people I found out that the baggy clothing served a purpose, to protect their bodies from the sugar cane leaves.
"I explained my intentions to the farmers that owned the land. Once they had given me permission to photograph the people working on their land, I then further approached the individual farm workers and explained to them my intentions, so that I could get permission from them to take their photographs. Once they agreed, I then took the photographs; but this was a long process because I would have to fly back to Cape Town, process the photos and then go back to Durban to give the sitters their photographs. It was important to me that they had copies of the images. I would then, while in Durban, shoot some more, and start the whole process again. So this all happened over several months."
The process by which Mthethwa collaborated with his subjects was one which, like the process of Rineke Dijkstra, took labored time to gain the trust of his subjects, to achieve the breakdown of inhibition necessary to portray not only the subjects themselves but an inner consciousness at peace with themselves and with the photographer.
Mthethwa's images challenge the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography. Transitioning away from the visually exotic and diseased or "Afro-pessimism," as Enwezor has called it Mthethwa employs a fresh approach marked by his use of color and his process of collaboration with his subjects.
In his effort to make "beautiful" photographs that make the subjects look good, Mthethwa found a balance between defiance and dignity. In the Sugar Cane series he achieves an exacting and subtle balance between subject portraiture and landscape, between local and global politics and, finally, between beauty and his subjects' low-wage labors which recall South Africa's era of apartheid.
For more information on this exhibit contact Jason Doty, j.doty@duke.edu.
Zwelethu Mthethwa, Untitled (Sugar Cane series), 2007, Chromogenic print, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York