Gerard Sekoto Gallery at Alliance Française, Johannesburg, South Africa
04 May 2018 - 31 May 2018
© Mauro Vombe 'Passengers'
In celebrating the retrospective exhibition of David Goldblatt at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (21 Feb – 13 May 2018) the French Institute in South Africa will be honouring his contribution to photography by having an exhibition of work from four photographers – Alexia Webster, Jabulani Dhlamini, Mauro Vombe and Pierre Crocquet – that David had selected called ‘Five Photographers’.
“Every now and then I see photographs that fill me with admiration and a sense of gladness for the strength and insight of the vision of photographers working here, very often with little reward or recognition.” – David Goldblatt .
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Alexia Webster: Street Studios
In Alexia Webster’s ‘Street Studios’, she uses street corners and public spaces to set up outdoor photo studios in different communities. Passing families and individuals are invited to interact to create portraits with the photographer. In these stories, notions of belonging intertwine with the constructed nature of the encounter. She has created street studio’s in Cape Town, Johannesburg, refugee camps in DRC and South Sudan, rock quarries in Madagascar, and in Mexico and India.
AlexiaWebster is a South African photographer. Her work explores intimacy, family and identity across the African continent and beyond. She was awarded the Artraker Award for Art in Conflict, the CAP Prize award for Contemporary African Photography, and she received the Frank Arisman Scholarship at the International Centre of Photography in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in South Africa, United States, Europe and India. Most recently she traveled to Juba, South Sudan and Tijuana, Mexico as part of an International Media Foundation fellowship.
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Jabulani Dhlamini: Recapture
Jabulani Dhlamini’s series‘Recapture’ is about the memory and remembrance of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, a turning point in South Africa’s history. He transforms mundane objects and spaces – the traces of eyewitnesses’ memories – into (anecdotal) monuments, reminding us of the past in the present – and the present in the past. Through these memories of trauma and violence, ‘Recapture’brings a resonance to the collective memory of Sharpeville.
Jabulani Dhlamini was born in Warden, South Africa in 1983. He lives and works in Johannesburg. His work deals with memory and remembering, traumas of the past and photographs as monuments. He is the Manager ‘Of Soul and Joy’, a project teaching photography skills to youth from disadvantaged backgrounds in Thokoza. After his studies at the Vaal University of Technology, Dhlamini was the recipient of the Edward Ruiz Mentorship 2011/12 at the Market Photo Workshop. He has exhibited his earlier series uMama at The Photo Workshop Gallery and Goodman Gallery Cape Town and Recapture at the Goodman Gallery Cape Town.
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Mauro Vombe: Passengers
Mauro Vombe’s work ‘Passengers’ deals with the inhuman conditions of informal public transport in Maputo, Mozambique. The powerlessness of the passengers is bared through their uncomfortable, cramped, disembodied and isolated figures and expressions. The series, as a social document, examines the passive nature of being a passenger – perhaps a metaphor for the human alienation in many encounters with power and capital.
For many people around the world this experience is immediately recognisable. On a daily basis, it is often the poor who are rendered powerless and stripped of their humanity through the basic act of going to work, going to the shops etc.
Mauro Vombe,born (1988) and based in Maputo, Mozambique, started photographing in 2006. His work connects to his earlier experience in theatre, unveiling hidden feelings and creating a form of collective or individual representation, and finds resonance from his work as news and events reporter. Vombe has received numerous awards locally and internationally. He participated in an exhibition dedicated to the 40 years of Mozambican photojournalism at Foundation Fernado Leite Couto in 2015. In 2017 he was an invited participant in the ‘Catchupa Factory’, in Mindelo, Cape Verde. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the democraSEE 2 award.
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Pierre Crocquet: Pinky Promise
The late Pierre Crocquet produced ‘Pinky Promise’, a work dealing with stories of victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. His photographs, severe, stark, yet delicate, reference the complexity, atrociousness and painfulness of these situations. The photographs are only a part of the extended and personal research that he conducted about abuse, survival and healing. The publication ‘Pinky Promise’deals with the lives of three paedophiles, and five victims of childhood sexual abuse.
Pierre Crocquet was born in Cape Town in 1971, grew up in Klerksdorp and died in 2013. Early in his career he focused on countering stereotypes of Africa in his publications Us (2002) and On Africa Time (2003).Crocquet spent considerable time photographing jazz and in 2005 exhibited this as Sound Check with a book published in the same name. In Enter/Exit, he documents Karatara, a tiny community on the edge of the Knysna Forest. It was published in 2007. Crocquet started working on Pinky Promise, dealing with childhood sexual abusein 2009 and in 2011/12 published his book/exhibition.
Curator: John Fleetwood and David Goldblatt
Walkabout: Wednesday, 23 May at 12h30 with the curator
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Gerard Sekoto Gallery
at the Alliance Française of Johannesburg
17, Lower park Drive Corner Kerry Road
Johannesburg, South Africa
