Best of issue two: Photography scholar Julie Bonzon explores Joburg’s Market Photo Workshop

JB. How has the Alternative Kidz series started? Why have you decided to focus on this specific subject?
MN. Because it was very close to me, it was very personal. I worked in different places, but mostly where my friends lived, in the East Rand and in Soweto. I would photograph my friends in their own personal spaces. As my work developed, I started photographing outside, in festivals and in clubs. I started mixing up with other people, not only close friends, but people who would have the same ideas about music, about culture. I wasn’t interested in the classical subjects of documentary photography. I wanted to photograph fashion, rock and roll… I wanted to document youth culture, and I wanted my work to feel like it.

JB. It seems that there is a clear difference between the photojournalistic, black and white photographs of protest, and your photographs.
MN. My pictures are more ‘trashy’, that’s how I consider them, or that’s what I’ve always aimed to achieve. I don’t follow the formal rules of photography. As I grew as an artist, I started using a point-and-shoot camera, and I would be on the dancefloor, dancing and photographing at the same time. They are trashy snapshots in an conscious way, trashy as if I am giving the images an attitude.

JB. Could you tell me more about music and fashion in Alternative Kidz?
MN. We used to listen to a lot of alternative music, especially Bloc Party, a band with a lead singer from Nigeria called Kele Okereke, and we listened to hip hop, anything that would be alternative to music that typically played in the township at the time, like kwaito and house music. This was related to the idea of being young and wanting to be different. Music was accompanied by fashion. Around 2005–2006, very skinny jeans were not mean to be worn by heterosexual guys. We would dress up in very tight jeans, dirty fake Converse sneakers, paint our nails with black nail polish, stretched our ear-lobes – break boundaries.

JB. Can an alternative identity be shaped through mass media tastes?
MN. Yes, I guess, when you are hungry for something different to what you are always bombarded with, you are most likely to rebel against it. I wanted a different image to what you would typically see on everyday media, and I didn’t care whether or not I would get published or hired for photography gigs.

JB. What do you think of the term ‘born free’ today?
MN. It has a different meaning for different people. For me, I think it means exactly what I did with Alternative Kidz. Young black people are still struggling, however, in terms of the thinking, the mind – I think the idea of being b’orn free’ makes sense. I was born in 1986, so I am not really ‘born free’, but I make choices about what I want to do with my life, to become an artist when it feels alright, and work a nine-to-five job when I need to. I guess I have been privileged enough to be an artist, and at some point in 2017, I wanted to work for a commercial art gallery, to curate exhibitions and art fairs, and that’s what I am doing. I guess you can say I am a ‘born free’ because of these opportunities.

JB. How did Skeem’ Saka come to life? What is your main subject of interest as a photographer?
SG. I am interested in investigating youth culture, from fashion aspect of it to the vernacular we use, to the way we walk, the way we talk – basically every conceivable influence. I am interested in investigating why I am behaving the way I behave in terms of my attitude towards people, my home language, my street language; what influences that, is it the media, or is it people around me? And adding the fashion side, not to focus on crime specifically, but to look at what connects people. Clothes to me came first. I started looking at how we dress in my neighbourhood and why, and I found that it is mostly what we see on TV. How can TV create my identity?

JB. Where do you locate those mass media influences?
SG. With Skeem’ Saka I specifically focused on criminals and gangster fashion – it has local and international references. Just by looking at movies, you get influenced by the way gangsters talk, by the way they dress, the women around them. I am focusing on Soweto, my city, my hood. Hopefully, I will take this project out of South Africa. If someone from Springs or from Cape Town can get what I am saying, I think this project could be exported somewhere else.

JB. What is the relationship between fashion, mass media and gangsterism?
SG. I initially wanted to do still lives from real gangsters, but as I was shooting, I realised that there was this gap between fiction and reality. When I approached real gangsters in my neighbourhood, they didn’t want to have their pictures taken. I decided to use my friends and stereotype them as gangsters. None of us are gangsters, but since gangster movies came out, such as the series Yizo Yizo, the body language and the clothes changed in Soweto. I started picking up how reality feeds fiction, and how fiction merges into reality. I was questioning who gets to be a gangster – also my neighbour is full of gangsters, and I really pick on them. My work is a combination of what I see on the TV and what I see in my everyday surroundings.

JB. Despite these cinematic references, it seems to me that the men photographed in your series are also breaking away from a stereotype.
SG. In movies, the way gangsters look is always stereotypical and limited. Also, how gangsters relate to women is problematic, because there is always violence involved. But with my work, I tried to twist that a bit; for instance, there’s a picture of a guy with his baby sleeping behind him, which also raises questions about the humanity of gangsters.

JB. How would you position your series in relation to the ‘born free’ debate?
SG. ‘Born free’ is quite huge, you know, but I think that we are a generation that challenges things, and in most cases we become rebellious. We are a generation that asks questions. We want to know why we live like this, we want to know why we dress like this, why we behave like this, we want to know where that comes from. I hope Skeem’ Saka will open questions about masculinity.

JB. How did you start this project?
MK. I met David Goldblatt and said that I was interested in the beachfront as a stage, using it as a metaphor for that purpose with these different ‘actors’ as they are walking in and out of it, who are also performing for you because you have a camera. The way I had originally thought of it was, from the promenade to the beach front, at a 35 mm view, what happens in this space? Depending on who is in it, it is a completely different play, but the space remains the same.

JB. What were the difficulties encountered in photographing The Front?
MK. I knew that I was going to shoot a very political space, a space I was not really part of, doing a project I was not quite sure of. In South Africa all work is political, but I never made any special effort to deliberately politicise the work, which was important because a lot of my other work has been very personal. When I was shooting this project, I didn’t know the space; I didn’t really know what I was doing and was still trying to get my head around it.

JB. How did you engage this historically segregated space today?
MK. I was really trying not to show and tell these separations and hammer down this ‘South African’ narrative. Especially coming from the Market Photo Workshop, I was so aware of my position as a privileged, young white straight male, going to spaces that I was not part of. I didn’t want to dominate the story, I didn’t want it to be ‘my’ perspective on race in South Africa, or like a political explanation of Durban beachfront as rewritten by Matt Kay. I wanted to be soft about it.

JB. Were you influenced by the iconography of the ‘struggle’ years of the 1980s and early 1990s while shooting this space?
MK. While working in South Africa today, you see a lot of those stereotypical images happening in front of you. And you almost take them. As a photographer, subconsciously you are referencing so many images that you are seeing all the time while you are working. It is hard not to just copy something that you have seen. The difficulty about this project was to try not to be political in a very political space, try to be respectful in a space where it is very easy to not be.

JB. In your other works, you seem to be working with portraiture and adopting a more lyrical or intimate approach.
MK. In South Africa the most important work at the moment is personal work, stuff that is like dealing with your own spaces because this is the one place where you can have your real voice without really rerunning the same narrative over and over. It is a difficult space, but this is where you have to work, I think. Not for everyone, but I believe that for white South African photographers right now, it is the most interesting space to engage with.

JB. What is Plastic Crowns about?
PK. The series deals with the issues that I had with my grandmother in particular. Her ideas of womanhood and what it represents and how you should carry yourself as a female, and me growing up in a different generation to hers and see those things as a stereotypical way of viewing females. I wanted to go against that and figure out for myself what womanhood and being a female is about, apart from these preconceived ideas.

JB. How is your view of womanhood different from your grandmother’s?
PK. My grandmother grew up at a time when you had to get married early. It is a very domesticated way of thinking of womanhood, how you take care of the home, how you should present yourself as a woman. Even the simple things like, as a woman, you sit with your legs closed, you are not out when it’s dark, you cook before a certain time. The fakeness of a plastic crown refers to the false sense of being in a way.

JB. How did this project start?
PK. The beginning of it came from looking at photo albums at home. I was always fascinated with the photo album, where everything was curated, everything was perfect in it. And we also had a box of images that were overexposed, that were not as curated as the ones you would find in the family album. I wanted to talk about what happens behind closed doors or what happens after the curated moments in the family albums.

JB. What about the image making process?
PK. A lot of the images were taken silently, or when my grandmother was away at Church, then I would dress in some of her clothing and then start photographing quickly. The images look so loud and kind of ‘in your face’, but when I photographed them it was a very silent and sneaky kind of process that I had to do, in order to try and keep the peace. I used my grandmother’s clothes to represent her times and then used my stuff as a way of communicating against that time.

JB. Plastic Crowns not only seems to disrupt a stereotypical image of domesticity, but also to challenge the way the female figure is usually depicted in that space. Could you tell me more about that?
PK. I started to not follow the rules of photography. I deliberately went against them because I also wanted to talk about the state of photography, or kind of how prim and proper everything is expected to be. But the stories I am telling are not prim and proper, and that needs to be reflected.

JB. How did you create those ‘failed’ snapshots?
PK. The funny thing about Plastic Crowns is that there was no postproduction. I used different female props such as dresses and headscarves to cover the camera, to create the filter. The covering of the lens also talks about the hidden. It talks about the unveiling of something or exposing of something. I was also thinking about spaces like Instagram, and how a lot of the filters of Instagram also mimic photo albums, or the way it is structured. So, it was also a way of talking about back then and now.

JB. How did you start this specific project?
TM. My idea was to deconstruct the whole ideology of what it means to be ‘born free’. I started photographing academics writing on that topic, and then I realised that the project was a very personal one – it was about self-discovery. I wanted to think about a shared reality with the people that I was photographing. What does democracy mean? What does it mean to be ‘born free’?

JB. ‘Born free’ seems to be an overused term cast upon a whole generation, how do you feel about this term?
TM. Yes, this is one of the reasons why I created the project, because I did not agree with the idea that, because you are born after 1994, everything is fine: this is ridiculous for me. But the project grew from a place of anger to a place of empathy. Conversations with John Fleetwood have been very interesting because we come from very different backgrounds. These two forces joined together made something really nice. I am truly happy with how the project turned out.

JB. Who are the people you were photographing?
TM. Mostly the people I photograph are the people that I grew up with or members of my family. I realised that I was battling with the term ‘born free’. I started taking portraits of people around me while asking them how they felt about this ideology. Within our differences, the project took shape. I started making more connections in my own community in Thokoza – these are people I photographed every day. I didn’t have to start from the point of being of an outsider. The intimacy was already established, I just had to capture the moments in between.

JB. The pictures you created in the context of the Of Soul and Joy project (Encounters, 2012) seem very different from the ones in Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe: turning to colour, taking pictures of people outdoors, moving from a domestic and an intimate setting to street sceneries.
TM. I had to explore other ways of photographing and new perspectives, not only be the fly on the wall, as I used to do in my practice, but to challenge myself and stay out of this comfort zone. For this specific project, it was about taking walks in the morning and in the afternoon, trying to find the picture, meeting the people that I knew and go with the flow.

JB. Have you thought about including self-portraits within the series?
TM. I am not really interested in photographing myself, I believe that I am already imposing much of myself when I take the image to begin with because I hold so much authority in selecting what goes in and what goes out of the frame. Also, there is no caption in the series because I don’t like to control the reading of the image. I believe that the image should be a dialogue between the viewer and the author.

JB. How have you worked against the term of ‘born free’ photographically?
TM. Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe evolved as a journey for myself and for the people I am closed to. It started becoming more like an autobiography. The work does not have so much weight as to say that it is a ‘born free’ project, but it is a project shot through a young person’s eyes.