The racialised reality of photography: ‘Past Present Currents’ at Cape Town’s AVA Gallery
Extract of review by Emma Dollery
“The racialised reality of photography: ‘Past Present Currents’ at Cape Town’s AVA Gallery” by Emma Dollery was originally published on Maverick Life
Installation view of Past Present Currents presented by Re-curators, AVA Main Gallery, 2021
The Association for Visual Arts Gallery’s latest exhibition explores the deeply ingrained biases of the photographic art form through the subversive work of five contemporary photographers, who aim to unravel the medium’s racialised past.
From its very inception, the practice of photography has been imbued with racialised prejudices and biases; to accept this as a fact is imperative in understanding the work that photographers of colour, such as those included in Past Present Currents, an exhibition that opened at Cape Town’s Association for Visual Arts Gallery gallery in mid-April (closing at the end of May), do to reappropriate and subvert the photographic medium.
Before photography, image making was largely done by artists who would draw or paint what they saw. While some were extremely skilled at lifelike renderings, the invention of photography captured life in unprecedented accuracy.
Encyclopedia Britannica put it like this: Photographs work in a way that the “essential elements of the image are usually established immediately at the time of exposure. This characteristic is unique to photography and sets it apart from other ways of picture making. The seemingly automatic recording of an image by photography has given the process a sense of authenticity shared by no other picture-making technique.”
When we think of photographs we think of real life. The subjects in the picture must have lived and the event must have happened for the image to exist at all. Britannica continues: “The photograph possesses, in the popular mind, such apparent accuracy that the adage ‘the camera does not lie’ has become an accepted, if erroneous, cliché.”
Now more than ever we know that photographs can be manipulated, that the photographer has a far larger role in what the photograph depicts (connotatively and denotatively) than simply capturing real life. However, we still hold on to the idea that photographs tell a “truth” of some kind.
Which brings us to the crux of the conceptual work behind Past Present Currents, put together by Re-Curators, a curatorial collective established by Amogelang Maledu, Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose, and Thembakazi Matroshe.
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