After two days in South Africa, I found I’d become distressingly colour-sensitive: I noticed how few black Africans there were at gatherings I went to, and how very many among those who served us. Apartheid ended in 1994 but its fumes have yet to dissipate, and before entering this exhibition of contemporary SA photography it’s worth visiting the Photography Room, where David Goldblatt’s images from the 1960s offer vital context. Goldblatt, one of the greatest living photographers, has pictures here, too. His ex-offenders of all colours, photographed at the scene of long-ago crimes, are brute testimony to a narrative of poverty and violence that did not end with official segregation.
One way or another, all 17 of the photographers in ‘Figures & Fictions’, of varying ages, races and levels of renown, exhale the toxic vapours of history. Jo Ratcliffe captures the leftovers of Portugese colonialism on the war-damaged Angola border; Zanele Muholi puts gay black men in poses disturbingly reminiscent of long-ago images of ‘natives’; Kudzanai Chiurai dresses his fake president in rap-star bling and gives him the distant gaze of Bonaparte as painted by Gros or David. This last has the perverse effect of making Chirai’s pictures less powerful, because the most startling aspect of many images here is the gaze of the gazed-on. No matter the context, it’s wary with tints of hostile.
In a varied exhibition, Pieter Hugo’s dusky images of a Nigerian man with muzzled hyena and Xhosa youths in post-circumcision tweeds stand out, as do Guy Tillim’s almost abstract pictures of Malawi famine. Graeme Williams memorably muddies the narrative of his shiny images with shadows and strange angles.
But the title is odd: where’s the fiction in this digging into contemporary South African identity? Santu Mofokeng, whose superb images of a Christian cave are included here, says that photographs ‘are already a fiction’ but the rude clarity of some digital photographs seems to want to refute that. Although the sharpest image can contain a cloudy or even poisonous notion – a truth clearly demonstrated by Roelof Petrus Van Wyk’s ‘Young Afrikaners’, whose blond, unsullied beauty would have made Hitler coo.