The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Jo Ractliffe: glimpses of an instant in history

2021-06-20T22:52:32.159Z


The photographer chooses for 'Babelia' her favorite work: an image that is part of her series 'reShooting Diana', included in the exhibition that PHotoEspaña dedicates to African photography at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid


In the early 1990s, Jo Ractliffe (Cape Town, South Africa, 60 years old) was robbed at her home in Johannesburg.

They took all the cameras except the Diana.

A very rudimentary machine that became fashionable in the sixties.

Its plastic structure and lens, coupled with the lack of exposure control, often result in images with dark edges and soft out-of-focus images with a very distinctive appearance.

Working with that gadget, practically a toy, was a challenge for the photographer, used to carrying a tripod in search of arid landscapes that shape an imaginary where the traumatic past of a nation resonates.

More information

  • Africa as we saw it, as it looks

  • Traveling to the Angolan border with Jo Ractliffe

"With the Diana I could photograph the mundane," recalls the artist in a telephone conversation. "I took the camera everywhere and used it on the way to work." It was thus that after passing through one of the informal settlements on the outskirts of the city, he was struck by a surprising vision, the head of a doll. Disheveled and worn, it broke the landscape embedded in a post. “It reminded me of Pablo Neruda's poem

La cabeza en el palo

", account. "An apocalyptic poem that somehow evoked the violence of the turbulent times in South Africa." In those days, after 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela had regained his freedom. His party, the African National Congress, had been legalized and the country was heading towards democratic elections. “However, euphoria and hope were clouded by the high degree of violence. For the foul play carried out by sympathizers of the

apartheid

regime

,

in order to sabotage democracy. Many activists lost their lives. Many whites were afraid, terrified of the violence, and of all that they could lose. So that blond head on a pole was a loaded image, with a certain surreal tone.

Doll's head

came to symbolize the fear of white people ”.

Doll's head

belongs to a series called

reShooting Diana

.

Its preparation had a lot to do with reading

Borrowed Dogs

, an essay written by Richard Avedon based on his family's photo album.

Each image was an important event.

They posed in front of houses or cars that were not their property and always with a dog that did not belong to them.

In one year he counted 11 different dogs.

"The images were a fiction, a lie about what they were, but a certainty about what they wanted to be," wrote Ractliffe on the occasion of the presentation of the series.

"This made me start to think about photography in a more critical way, its different practices, conventions, all serving different interests and different truths."

Dark poetics

Thus, the series works as a reflection on the photographic medium itself, and what we expect from it when building the history of a country “During the eighties, in those moments of resistance to

apartheid,

activism and a documentary photography that emphasized the idea of ​​objectivity and truth. They sent a clear message. They were very journalistic. Very defined and contrasted, with a clear content and alluded to things and subjects that were easy to recognize ”, highlights the photographer. “Working with Diana was a result that did not fit within that social document dimension. However, his poetics were dark. As dark as the times ”. The properties of the camera allowed him to defy photographic conventions: "Express things obliquely."

Doll's Head

is perhaps the most direct image of all that make up the series. There are 60 images of 50 by 50 centimeters, which were once exhibited as an installation. Placed between glass sheets, they hung from the ceiling so that the viewer could move between them “Many of them were taken out while driving on the country's roads. It was intended to give them a quality of material objects as opposed to a picture hanging on a wall. I had in mind the vision that one builds of things when driving a car; a half memory, of something that one does not just see completely ”. Many of the images that make up this series have that quality. They are not entirely defined. They are glimpses of a moment. Sparkles along a path.

The image is part of the exhibition

Eventos de lo Social. African photography in The Walther Collection

, the

highlight of the latest edition of PHotoEspaña, which is exhibited at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. It is the second time that the funds of this magnificent collection have been shown in Spain. It is the most important private collection of African art. Gathered over the years under the sensitivity and interests of the German collector Artur Walther, one of the most relevant people on the international photography scene, whose fondness for the unknown led him to travel through Africa and China in search of authors that like Jo Ractliffe, although respected in her country, she had not achieved global recognition.

Okwui Enwezor was a very important figure for me.

He saw in me something that until then no one had seen "

In the same way, the spirit of Okwui Enwezor underlies the show.

Referred to in

The New York Times

as “the curator who

remapped

the art world,” his groundbreaking 2006 exhibition,

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemprary African Photography,

redefined the field of contemporary African art.

He was a close collaborator of Walther for the collection, which includes a series of publications and programming as a space of significance in which to show, discover, and study photography.

He passed away two years ago.

His last work was the edition of the book

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait

, (Steidl / The Walther Collection), the first in-depth study of the work of the Nigerian artist chameleon, which is also on display at the show.

"Okwui was a very important figure for me," says Ractliffe.

“He saw something in me that no one had seen before.

I had already been working for 17 years when I met him, but always, in some way, on the outskirts.

I was never included in exhibitions on South African photography.

Until Enwezor visited me in 1997, together with the Canarian critic Octavio Zaya, when they were preparing the Johannesburg Biennial.

Years later he went back to Walther ”.

Last year

Photographs: 1980´s to Now

was published

(Steidl / The Walther Collection), the first monograph to bring together the 35-year career of its artist.

It was chosen as one of the best photography books of the year.

There are 12 images of Ractliffe that hang in a room that brings together several authors under the title

The Earth as a Subject.

They stand in front of one of the series by legendary photographer David Goldblatt. The author collaborated in The Market Photo Workshop, which has played a crucial role in educating the country's photographers, connecting with the most marginal part of society. “Goldblatt's work is so rich that there was no place in South Africa that he would not have photographed. I often describe him as an archivist, the great chronicler of our landscape. There are many people who know places of our nation through their gaze, ”he says. “I have been photographing that landscape since the eighties, so after David there was little left to do and it was necessary to work hard to get a new vision of those places. Hence, I proposed a more ambiguous approach, which will activate the spectator's imagination ”.

“Half of my understanding of the world or even myself comes through my South African identity. That's where my essence comes from "

The author has always remained linked to her roots and delving into them has defined her art and her existence. “Half of my understanding of the world or even myself comes through my South African identity. I am very happy to be labeled both as a woman and as a South African. That's where my essence comes from ”, he assures. “I have worked a lot in Angola, but even that work was framed within the South African prisons within Angola (during one of the great conflicts in the history of Africa, the War of the Bush). My work is completely embedded in the South African landscape and the complexity of being white here. Something that disarmed me when I was young. I have struggled to feel that this was my country. I wasn't sure I had the right to feel it. "

Does the landscape have memory? Or are we the ones who impose it on them? "The answer is somewhat complex and contradictory," he reflects. “On the one hand, I would say that the landscape is simply the landscape. It remains indifferent to man's attempts to destroy it in the sense that it is capable of rebuilding itself. It fascinates me how Chernobyl is now a new Eden where animals and men return. It has survived nuclear radiation. But on the other hand it is true that it is loaded with memory, perhaps we are the ones who implanted it, but there are geographies that preserve the trace of a violent past. A psychologist would say that it is a personal projection, but as I get older I think that things have much more entity than we think. Even the photographs themselves have it,they are not just an image on emulsified paper ”. Thus, in the subtle and disturbing beauty of Ractliffe's work, silence reverberates, the silence that takes over the landscape after tragedy and trauma.

Social events.

African photography in The Walther Collection

.

Circle of Fine Arts of Madrid.

Until August 22.

You can follow BABELIA on

Facebook

and

Twitter

, or sign up here to receive

our weekly newsletter

.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-06-20

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-26T20:32:52.157Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.