Five Photographers: A Tribute to David Goldblatt

Five Photographers reflects on world renowned photographer and South African icon David Goldblatt’s contribution to photography by looking at a new generation of photographers. This exhibition, one of the last projects that Goldblatt worked on, was developed as a tribute exhibition by the French Institut of South Africa to celebrate his retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2018 (Feb-May 2018).

It includes the work from 4 photographers that Goldblatt and John Fleetwood had selected, called ‘Five Photographers’. The exhibition title playfully references David as another photographer.

Co-curated by Goldblatt and Fleetwood, the exhibition was first shown in Johannesburg at the Alliance Française (May 2018). After Goldblatt’s passing, the exhibition traveled to the Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, Maputo, Mozambique (Feb 2019) and to Café What? In Maseru, Lesotho (May 2019). In 2019, it will further be shown at the National Arts Festival and at the Durban Art Gallery. The Durban leg of the exhibition tour is supported by an ANT Mobility Grant.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS

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.

Alexia Webster 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 travelled 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 announced the recipient of the democraSEE 3 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 abuse in 2009 and in 2011/12 published his book/exhibition.

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This exhibition is produced by Photo: with support from Institut Francais-South Africa and the Alliance Française of Durban.