Stadium, Durban, South Africa

Lots of people photograph iconic architecture, so the challenge is to try and see it a bit differently. Stadiums are about people, they contain spectators - and people move into them before events, and out of them after events. And in-between, there isn't much movement, so they sit there like big UFO's.

So movement is a nice thing, here with a single solitary girl, dead-still on her mobile phone for some balance to the image. Maybe she couldn't find someone, or maybe they never came.

Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban - the iconic stadium built for the Soccer World Cup 2010, Nikon D700, June 2012

Man reading, Cape Town

Into the Light

Into the Light is a travelling exhibition to showcase the work of the Ubuntu Community Chest, an important umbrella charity in Durban, South Africa that celebrates its 80th year during 2011. The exhibition will be at several galleries during the last months of 2011, starting at the Corner Café, and moving to Artspace Durban, and then to the Fat Tuesday Gallery.

I’m sitting quietly on the floor, camera in hand, at a rehabilitation centre for children with severe disabilities in Durban, South Africa. Staffers are trying to get the children to eat. I’m trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, but the camera is an obtrusive and large mechanical device, even if most of the children don’t know what it is, or what it does. The young boy I’m sitting next to on the floor, doesn’t want to eat, and pushes the food out of his mouth. A few toys placed into his hand by a caregiver are flung on the floor. He looks at me, not knowing who I am or why I am there and my presence clearly disturbs him. He bursts into loud, uncontrollable tears and nothing or no-one, not even his parents can console him. I gently move away, slipping into the shadows, waiting perhaps, sometimes for what seems like ages to somehow attempt to become part of the normality of the scene and be an accepted part of the daily goings-on.

At another institution, a home for the elderly, I’m taken in to visit an elderly lady and her husband. They are having an afternoon chat. I’m invited to join in the conversation, and while I’m listening and participating, I’m feeling both uncomfortable with sharing their intimate teatime, and at the same time, concentrating deeply for that fleeting tender moment that I just intuitively sense will happen. All of a sudden, there it is, a few words exchanged between them, a soft and tender moment; a loving glance that defies the presence of the camera, and is only broken once the shutter clatters across the gentleness of a sun-filled room. I have the moment, one of exquisite gentleness between two people who must have spent a lifetime together, and for that moment their connectedness was so strong that they forgot all about me, an intruder on their intimacy.

Every year for the last nine years, I have spent time doing work pro-bono for the Community Chest, an umbrella charity body in Durban, South Africa. This venerable institution has been in operation for eighty years this year, assisting nearly 100 often-struggling charities in KwaZulu Natal, an overpopulated and economically challenged province in the newly democratized South Africa. It’s one of the few bodies that have been able to distribute funds, know-how and care with none of the corruption and misappropriation of funds so common to the developing world. It’s an organization that is almost entirely reliant on volunteerism, an important concept in building societies anew in an unbalanced country like South Africa, with huge and growing gaps between rich and poor, and where state funds often don’t end up benefitting the people who need them most. Those people in need comprise the very young, some with terminal cancer, HIV, those who are orphaned, to the old, sick and helplessly frail. And there are also groups of people with limited abilities making and assembling products for industry, learning to cope in an unrelentingly capitalist world that often forgets those of less ability in a quest for cheaper skilled labour to march to the tune of the never-ceasing production line.

Although I find working for the Community Chest a challenging task, it’s probably the assignment I look forward to most. The challenges are in many ways similar to those faced by all documentary photographers, and in taking the images, I find that I have to face issues that make me question my own morality as a photographer.

For a start, people with disabilities are more vulnerable to the exploitative potential of the camera. Photographer Diane Arbus, who perhaps redefined how we see people at the margins was, despite being lauded for her contribution to modern photography, also criticized by many, most notably Susan Sontag, for not only being exploitative but placing people in a context of despair and hopelessness. I have always tried to be ultra sensitive to the way I have portrayed people who often don’t have the voice to say no to the intrusion of the camera; searching for the subtle expressions of fear and mistrust, trying to interpret emotions that would make me back off rather than invade the extra private and unexplored inner worlds of the people I see through my viewfinder. I have been careful, for example, not to convey hopelessness by minimizing the way people fit into photographic space, by using an ultra-wide angle lens to somehow diminish their stature and scale in their surroundings.

In a very real sense, then, these are classic documentary works of photography in style and execution rather than gimmicks to distort and manipulate the emotions of the viewer. They make no attempt to judge the external context, to place people in a world that is either filled with hope or devoid of meaning and prospect. I become the documentary voyeur; I let the eyes and the body language communicate directly with me and in so doing allow the viewer to interpret their own emotional response rather than attempt to construct that world for them as is so often the nature of contemporary portraiture.

The viewfinder itself, hidden behind prisms and mirrors and lens elements forms a substantial emotional barrier between the photographer and the photographed. It’s the shield that allows me to see in a way that for that brief moment isolates me from the temptation to construe emotional judgments at the time I make the image. It’s only afterwards, reviewing the material, that I often experience moments of deep emotional strain, and mental exhaustion; when all the work is done, and in the silence of my office, late at night, I ponder on the images that are now forever etched onto my mind and the hard drive of my computer.

When I spoke at the opening of this exhibition at the celebration of the Community Chest’s 80th anniversary, I reminded people that these images were just a frozen moment in time; and that since the images were taken, some of those photographed may have moved on to a better life, or died, or in some way found themselves in a different emotional or physical space, be it better or worse. After the talk, one of the directors of an old age institution came over to me and talked fondly of a man in one of my photographs who had died a year or two ago. I had not known this, and director went on to say that this picture had really brought such good memories to him of this elderly man. “His wife would so love that image, “ he said, “ she only has memories, and no photographs at all.” I was happy to promise to send her a copy. If I have just touched the soul of a single person in this body of work, the effort has been more than worthwhile.

Sweat, Pay, Drive

Sweat, Pay, Drive
A few days in Bali, Indonesia

One of my favourite things to do is to travel, and the opportunity to immerse myself along with a camera in the rich, exotic and colourful destinations of South East Asia is a pleasure that is hard to beat. So it was with much anticipation and a bag full of camera gear that we headed off to Bali, Indonesia, a deeply spiritual island and of course, popularised in that recent book and movie, Eat, Pray Love, referred to in Bali (and not without good reason) as “that damned book.”

One should never take photography as a given or for granted; don’t assume that your eyes will be open to seeing the image even after years of experience, or that you will find the right places at the right times. I have learnt, and this was an add-on to that learning experience, that photography is a curious and intangible mix of chance, circumstance, skill and magic, and those factors all need to tumble together simultaneously. Sometimes they just don’t.

Our resort was in Legian in the heart of the tourist area, part of a long strip of similar resorts sandwiched between a seemingly endless street of souvenir shops and a stretch of busy beach, packed with surfers, wannabe posers and bikini babes. The hotel grounds afforded few opportunities for photography. Ok, there were some around the pool, which was occupied almost exclusively by Australians tanning, eating burgers and chips, and watching the Ashes on TV at the pool bar with the inevitable large beer mug or three on hand. Some of these people were quite interesting photographically, including one huge fella who was obviously expanding his Tattoo on a daily basis at one of the local ink shops. But none of these folk lent themselves to comfortable photography. I’m not one for lurking paparazzi style behind a palm tree with a long lens, and no one wants their privacy invaded on holiday even if their body does make a definitive social statement. In the internet era, a lot of people in the US and other countries where there is paranoia about security, see photographs of themselves as a gross violation of privacy, something that was never really an issue before 911 and the advent of ubiquitous cheap and cheerful cameras and mobile phones with built in cameras. Photograph someone’s kids nowadays and you’re a paedophile, take an image of the wrong building and you are planning a terror attack. It’s part of the irony of 21st Century photography; there are millions more cameras, but the freedom to use them has diminished considerably.

Street photography in the endless kilometres of souvenir and tourist shops that straddled Legian and Kuta was not a terribly exciting prospect, or if it was, I just wasn’t seeing the images. The people on the street were for the most part foreigners, while the locals huddled deep within the air-conditioned refuge of their shops, except for the more desperate ones, who actively offered you row upon row of fake Ray Bans and Rolex watches on the street. Every now and again, a wonderful doorway, and a glimpse into someone’s home temple would break the visual monotony. I felt the urge to wander into these secret and ancient spaces, but they were private spaces and I would have been intruding in someone’s home. So apart from a few tentative steps, I didn’t.

The wonderful thing about places like Bali, and that in fact applies to most of South East Asia, is that you can safely walk the street, any time of night or day with all your best camera equipment and be totally safe. You may be able to do better street photography in the streets of South Africa, but you stand a good chance of not having your camera with you upon your return home.

Bali is drippingly and unrelentingly hot. Walk ten metres anytime between 10am and 4 pm in summer and you are guaranteed to be sweaty and lethargic in minutes. While your equipment is safe, hotels and shops have their air conditioning set to coldroom levels, so the minute you take your camera outside, you see instant misty condensation forming on the lens and sensor. Internal water staining is not a risk I like to take with my better lenses, so one has to endure the whole exercise of putting your gear into cold air-filled plastic bags and letting them equalise for about half an hour when you walk out into the thick, soupy air of Bali.

After a few days of this intolerable exercise, the sheer weight of my camera bag, and the blood sapping heat, the D700 and lenses got to live pretty much permanently in the hotel safe, and the compact cameras, the Canon S90 and G12 came along for the ride.

By now I must be sounding to my readers like a lazy photographer. I’m not. Far from it, in fact. A month or two ago I spent the afternoon shooting in a township after sustaining a severe fall which required several stitches later than evening.

But if all the elements are not falling into place, then it’s best to let go. Relax. Don’t push yourself to see something you are just not seeing. That will compound the frustration. I’ve learnt that tomorrow, or next week or next month, are filled with new promise and fresh opportunity.

Philosophy aside, we decided to take a road trip inland to attempt to discover the real Bali. So, we got a driver, and a car and explained to our driver what we wanted to see. “The real Bali,” I said, “village life, the coffee plantations, the cool interior and the volcano that is much a mystic part of Balinese culture, rice paddies like green stepping stones rising into the jungle.” Well, I wasn’t quite that poetic, but that’s what I wanted to see.

Our taxi driver was a friendly and affable man who talked continuously, as if he had swallowed a cassette tape. Sometimes we got the gist of what he was saying. And often we didn’t, but we would nod and um and ahh at appropriate places in the monologue because it seemed the polite thing to do. All this time I watched all manner of instant images speed past the passenger window, but by the time one might have been able to find a place to stop, the elements of the jigsaw would long have tumbled out of place. Finding a place to stop in Bali is not easy. There must be more motorbikes and scooters in Bali that any other place on earth. Seriously.

The real difficulty of photography in Bali is trying to find places that are easily accessible and are not being fully exploited for tourism. Almost every country road we travelled on had row upon row of shops, millions of carved parrots, statues, paintings, chairs, tables and so on. How they find customers for these warehouse loads of ornaments is anyone’s guess.

Even the volcano had been harnessed into the service of tourism, with a boom gate and an entrance fee and rows of shack like restaurants and refreshment houses touting for customers and clinging tenaciously like Praying Mantises to the side of the steep banks that overlooked this spiritual mountain.

Most of my images of Bali hint at this underlying commercialism, since it is so pervasive. Even a traffic policeman in the middle of nowhere smilingly and pleasantly extracted a small bribe from our taxi driver. Making a dollar is essential to life, and seems to balance in comfortably with the temples and gods that line every street to serve people’s more spiritual needs.

My only bit of real photographic trickery is the expansively green and stepped image of the rice paddies, a seemingly charming rural scene, unspoilt and peaceful. What you don’t see, is that five feet behind me is a long string of tourist shops, T-shirt vendors, touts and postcard sellers as well as tour buses filled with folk speaking Russian. The deception of imagery. I have been more brutally honest with the rest.

So there it was. Our well-meaning taxi driver’s version of the real Bali. But it was the tourist version, neatly packaged in bite size chunks, a consumable product like French fries. All wallet and no soul.

Ok, so Bali wasn’t going to win me any photographic awards, but I learnt a few valuable lessons. First off, access to the heart of a country varies dramatically from place to place, so do all the research and planning you can before you get there. Secondly, travelling light can be ok. You can do some amazing things with today’s high-end compact cameras. Thirdly, sometimes it just is not meant to be, no matter how hard you try. And finally, if it’s not meant to be this time around, it’s not gone forever. It will return.

I never got into the real soul of Bali. It is there, of that I am sure. I did get to understand a few things about the place, though. It’s a very likeable destination. It’s a place of small details, vignettes, and subtleties. Maybe next time, maybe not…but that’s the essence of the photographic journey.


Cameras Nikon D700/Canon G12/Canon S90

A short visit to South East Asia

I have a deep passion for South East Asia, and for Malaysia. I love its diversity of sights, sounds and visual signals.