As many of you know, I snuck back into New Zealand the Saturday before last, not long after sunrise, curiously about the same time of day as when I left. If I appear to have lain low since then, that’s may well have something to do with getting back in the teaching saddle last Monday. I’ve taught more or less continuously since then. Now, with a small hiatus before we leave for Wedderburn on Friday morning, I’ve had a little time to think about the pictures I made in Africa.

When I went, it was with no particular concept in mind, an unusual state of being for me, given that I have tended to work in blocks or in bodies of work for the last 20 years or so. Those of you close to me will know that I didn’t actually go for the photography, but for more personal reasons. I went to find out other things, and to sum up, I got those things in  spades! This however, is not the place to talk about those things. Perhaps another time, perhaps another place …

I did take my cameras with me, although I trimmed the outfit down to 2 camera bodies and three lenses. I didn’t go to photograph the wild animals; I’ve tried that before, with very average success. While this may appear heretical, I don’t really think I’m that interested myself in making a masterly photograph of one of the big five. Frankly, I would much rather watch a giraffe loping across the veld then ruin the experience by indulging my ego and attempting to make-the a great photograph of it. I would much rather stand in the predawn darkness of the Tankwa Karoo, listening to the nervous shuffle of Springbok around the house, and the sound of black-backed jackals chatting away somewhere out in the night. Anyway, as a wise man once said: the trick is not knowing when to make the photograph, the trick is knowing when not to make the photograph. When it comes to wild animals, I suspect not is a better place for me to be. I have the same feeling about photographing fungi.

I didn’t go to photograph the flowers of Namakwaland. It was the wrong time of the year anyway. And the opportunity to travel to Namibia and photograph the dunes wasn’t there either. Again the wrong time of the year thing:  South African friends, who are knowledgeable about these sorts of things, tell me the ideal time to photograph the dunes is in April (but you didn’t get that from me; they swore me to secrecy).

This time I decided I wanted to be opened to whatever presented itself, to use the opportunity to explore anything and everything, to keep my antennae raised to potential new trends. I decided to go with any idea that came along, to try partnering unlikely combinations, to match make between the components of my digital toolbox. Anything, anywhere. Whatever. Sometimes giving yourself permission to play, indulging the child within, can lead to potential new discoveries.

Heck, it worked for Picasso.

Those of you interested, who haven’t been there already, can see the results of some of these experimentations here. But those aren’t all. There are others, and when I break them down, they seem to clump together into ideas with some affinity, which I then discard, and from which I move along. There are the manipulated paddocks of the Swartland and the Overberg, the snatches of life in Stellenbosch, when I wandered around with one camera and one lens, and my response to the austere beauty of the Tankwa Karoo, which leaned back towards the representational/interpretive. There were the explorations of what it means to be a tourist there, at Cape Point and Signal Hill. An idea considered, an idea explored. But not too far.

Over the last week, back in Aotearoa, separated from the reality of South Africa, and able to distance myself, the small body of work I made one morning in Bo Kaap, under a fierce sun, when I walked around on foot with minimal preconceptions, has become to come closer and closer to the fore. The more I look at it and think about it, the more it begins to satisfy me.

It’s great fun to take your work and put it into pigeonholes. It can also be quite edifying. In doing this, you can get a sense of what is working, what is not, and potential directions for the future. Or not. Some of my work fits neatly into the landscape pigeonhole. Some of it is easy to label as documentary photography, but some of it seems to defy being placed and many pigeonhole. If it’s more neatly into the places between, slips quietly into a place which is much harder to label. And that can be edifying in its own right.

There is this little place, a bit like the Diagon Alley of Harry Potter, which exists, even though it is hard to find, a kind of crack into which some of my pictures appear to fall. I’ve included a couple here. The yellow picture with the blue car, is one such. It’s not really an urban landscape, because it really doesn’t give you much information about the urban environment. It’s not really a documentary photograph, because it doesn’t tell you much about life, or the human condition. There is no real social imperative to the photograph, so it really couldn’t be called political. But I do find it intensely satisfying, and I’m wondering why. It’s a simple enough picture; parts of the dwelling and half a rusting Renault, with the rock to stop the car rolling back down the hill. For reasons that probably the owner of the car knows, he hasn’t had the brakes fixed. Perhaps he can’t afford it; perhaps he doesn’t know where to go to have it repaired; perhaps he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. The point is, there is a small story here, one which ordinarily most of us would miss. And therein lies the beauty of the camera; its ability to show us those small stories, to make us aware of the micro within the macro. I suspect I may be looking into a photographic Diagon Alley, and ever one to reach for a label, the tale I will pin to this donkey will be called social landscape.

In the other picture of the car and building, there was a maid slowly sweeping the steps outside the house. I really didn’t see her at first; the bright colours of the houses and cars were really shouting at me. The movement of his sweeping occurred out on the periphery of my vision, so I decided to frame the photograph that way. Each day she probably makes the journey from the informal settlement where she lives, goes about her business quietly and almost invisibly, and then departs in similar fashion at the end of the day. She has probably been doing it for years, living and working in Cape Town, saving up to go and visit her family back in the east of South Africa, probably in the Siskei. Her life is probably almost invisible. Framing the photograph in this way, to my mind, accentuate this. Another social landscape perhaps? An overlooked reality?

Africa-the angel is sometimes in the details.