Produced for the Twenty Journey Catalogue
“It would seem the very denial of dreaming that society seems to impose on black folks, while it hasn’t made us dream less, does seem to punish us for what dreams we do have.” Kevin Young- The Grey Album
In the clutches of the white photographer, the camera is as light as a gun aimed by policeman at a black boy.
Images taken:
- In De Doorns, empty unfunished structures force themselves tightly out of the ground. RDP housing- a forest of brick, and sand and cement. They seem to push against each other, a mouth with too many teeth. And in front, a turgid mound of sand impaled under a wooden cross as though to remind us that the state-subsidised structures might as well be a graveyard.
-In Worcestor, a man is cornered like a wounded animal. Standing where the walls meet, his eyes are startled, his shoulders hunched. The massive Teddy Bear behind him, however, seems unperturbed.
- In Mitchell’s Plein the boy is suspended horizontally in mid-air. His body twists, a mobius strip of misshapen skin and sky and blood and bone. Shattered glass paves the path, a broken river. The not-so-yellow brick road.
-In Upington, currogated iron that flashes hot white draws lines on either side of the misshapen head. He eyes look at us, but we aren’t certain what he sees.
- There’s a sister in a white habit. We know this even though we never really get to see her. What we see; a white vest worn over a white shirt, a silver cross on a white rope lightly lying on her chest. In another image, the figure in white has her back to us, the image repeating itself in a puddle of water.
- In Potchefstroom, the decapitated body begins mid-way through the back, and the legs that pour out of denim shorts are caught and puddle in a pair of white socks.
-At the fun fair we find a red-head in wheelchair; a snow-capped head with an arched or humped back.
- In Johannesburg, more disjointed pieces. Floating heads in Panama hats watching Polo.
----------
Black artistry carries a particular burden. What W.E.B Du Bois termed “Double Consciousness”, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of the other. Each artist takes it on unknowingly. It is the withdrawn and thunderous dark sky under which we dream, breathe, live, create. And that sky is heavy, always threatening to split herself apart and pelt sharp broken fragmentations down on the black artist. This unique weight is the heaviness of never walking alone, of carrying nations and 5000 years of history in your back pocket. When you speak to the black artist, you will understand that his voice is always hoarse. Cause and effect: you tire of speaking when every word you utter is meant to be representative of a tribe, chosen or forced, regardless of whether or not one affiliates with any.
The artist becomes the lonely truth-speaker, charged with the task of forever explaining the black condition to white people, to black people. Of having their work only distil down to one thing, their melanated skin and whether or not it means that they came from a broken home, grew up in a shack, performed any rituals that deviated them from the “normal path” of life, and landed them on this self-alienating journey. As though drinking blood-water and eating flesh-bread were a better kind of cannibalism.
Imagination is the realm of the white man. The black artist must just follow, carefully towing the line, straddling the line, walking the line. Dragging behind them, bound by rope, the impossibility of being black, of being an artist.
Now, what it means to be a white artist is never having to explain. This is the true unbearable lightness of being. The bastardised buoyancy of knowing, absolutely, that the bungee cord will never break. That you will never land face down on the ground, and break. The cord will always snap back, snaking through the sky, pulling you with it. It will not break, and neither will you.
Idiosyncrasy- A characteristic, habit, mannerism or the like, that is peculiar to an individual/ a distinctive or peculiar feature or characteristic of a place or thing.
Now, to say you are documenting idiosyncrasies says little-to-nothing. Existing somewhere between fact, fiction and feeling; “idiosyncrasy” tells us where to locate the camera, how wide to cut the frame. While it does not propose a thematic link, it does speak to the posture and position of the photographer. About the planets and stars and suns that compose his cosmology. About the ghosts that push and prod. About the impulses he reacts to when he points and clicks, when he points and shoots, when he points and frames. It tells us something about how he uses his camera, of white South African ideas of essentialism and exceptionalism, of reverence and importance, of dignity and deference.
Snapshots have always existed, for black people, as sites of struggle. Within the delineations of a photograph we find content and contestation. These light-paintings provide us with an opportunity to create counter-hegemonic images. To document. To construct a black aesthetic. Photos can give and take, expand understandings or shrink them. Photographs can devastate both the seer and the seen.
Under Sean Metterlerkamp’s gaze, the white body is never intact. It’s somehow disembodied, floating, fragmented. The white body exist in pieces- a puzzle that forces the viewer to be involved, to complete the image. To paint, with their empathy and history, a finished pentimento.
The breaks do more than disrupt our way of seeing, they distort the ways in which we engage with the image and comprehend it. The splinters force the viewer to insert themselves into the fissures. The breaks allow the subjects to never become that, a subject at the end of a barrel of a camera. The white body, relying on our empathy and imagination, remains human and three-dimensional, irreducible to stereotypes and flat platitudes. By denying the ability to actually see, the viewer becomes a spectator but the subject remains alive, stretching outside of the frame, living beyond the image and in the imaginative faculty. In the frame, the white subject is protected.
The ones unprotected by the frame are the ones unprotected by society. The under-privileged ones, the dirty ones, the black ones, the little ones; they all appear in full. Snatched from their context, they are imprisoned in the delineations of Sean Metterlekamp’s eye. The photographs produced here will mislead those who are vulnerable to them. You will not find yourself here, bathing in dignity. Instead you will be broken, bored into, bent over, black. In this photographer’s frame, the disenfranchised body is the body cornered.
In an unconventional family portrait shot in Onverwacht, a man sits staring at us. He’s surrounded by three small children in various states of undress, a head pokes into the image from the bottom right corner of the frame. Metterlerkamp captions the image “ Family portrait of ‘I cannot recall their names but remembered the stories we shared.’” The story he shares:
“Onverwacht is a quaint Afrikaans community with neat dirt roads, healthy trees and it is filled with BLACKS! and COLOUREDS! Excluding the two other WHITES! shuffling about, I was the only WHITE! I found the village to be an anomaly because of this and because of that.
I stuck out like a sore one. The stale dog squinted at me from behind the fence and snapped an embarrassed bark at me. A COLOURED! slash BLACK! family shared a laugh with me from their stoep and invited me in. In that moment, from behind the fence, my daily confusion faded and I understood a little bit more of this and perhaps just a little bit more of that.”
This anecdote, like the images he makes, is also a snapshot. It’s a picture in which he turns the camera on himself and reveals the thinking that guides his gestures and his lens. We see here, with a little more clarity, Metterlerkamp’s fascination with the freakish other. The Caps-lock, exclamation point other. BLACKslashCOLOUREDslashPOORslashNOTFULLYABLED. The people photographed exist as canvasses on which we can pour out our judgements. Where we can tut-tut-tut, and point and stare from the safe distance of two-dimensionality. The artist has positioned himself behind the clerical fence, and he stays there, peering at the weird and wonderful freaks. In his anthropomorphisizing presence, even dogs become embarrassed.
Metterlerkamp feels like “an alien”. “I’ve never really felt like I belong anywhere. As a kid I moved around a lot,” he explains, “and so I kind of existed in my own head.” He lived abroad for a while, in London and New York but upon returning to South Africa, he began to view the country differently, to notice things that had never commanded his attention before.
“I have like a love-hate relationship with South Africa,” he says. “When I managed to escape South Africa, I could not connect to any of the ‘weirdness’ that I’m used to at home. It was only a realisation once I came home. I began to hear all the sounds, all the sights and the smells. I like how weird this is and how strange this place makes me feel. I feel now I understand South Africa better. So I decided to stop making all this escapist work and deal more with reality. With the day to day.” The work he’s referring to are the music videos and highly stylised portraits he used to shoot. Most notably, he filmed a short video “Zef Side” featuring the controversial collective, Die Antwoord. He decided to “deal head on with things. And so I decided to put myself in uncomfortable situations as a manner of challenging myself and learning. I’m attracted to the dark side of things. I’m interested in finding things that don’t work and finding out why they don’t work. So for me, exploring idiosyncrasies means looking at the [juxtaposition] of the weird and the wonderful, the good and the bad. I decided for this work to just respond to my instinct.”
The square face-brick block has no windows, only a metallic vent and a white, flat slab roof. It’s stifling, stuffy. It would be imposing if it didn’t have a hole blown into its side, spilling tangled wires like the entrails of a gutted beast. The sky is as hard as the arid ground beneath it. Impenetrable. A billowing cloud casts an ominous shadow. Alien Abduction. A black child sits on the sandy ground. Dust is the brown of the skin, of the skinny angled legs, of the ground she sits on. Although she hides her face behind a blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll; we feel we can still see her. The man wears bulky leather shoes. Bending down, he grabs the iguana by it’s scaly red tale. He looks down at the ground. Body turned away from us. Visage invisible. A man waits at a concrete bus-stop, looking out at the road. The stop was painted once. Bright, solid colours. Blocks and lines. The paint has faded now. The naked man’s skin is glistening with what could be sweat. Is he running away from the camera or towards something else? If you just saw the head, you would believe the bull to still be alive. The eye, while crying blood, is still looking, still searching. Resting on its own dismembered body, the red of the blood bounces off the patchy blue wall. The bananas are covered by blanket. Their thick, green skin may not be sufficient to insulate them from the cold. Walking past the pink wall, her purple dress streams out behind her. A green sign sells funeral plans, she covers her head with a jersey.The Tin Men stand guard, watching their colony from a 360 degree view. A black man in jeans is strewn on the ground. Playing dead or practising. With their back turned towards us, the heads float under straw. Some of the body- never all. Cows are wealth. Black blood fertilises the ground in Marikana.The legs are balanced on cans of baby food. A rudimentary circus act. Blacks on the green when it’s not so green. Some reflective surfaces will distort your image. Some eyes will look and not see.
Living on the road, the journey forces the photographer into perpetual foreignness. He is no longer at home, and stays nowhere long enough to attempt to temporarily construct one and so he flits, like a shadow person, in and out of our consciousness, in and out of his own. He will come alive at times, when the perfect image makes itself, when the bulb flashes and the shutter clicks but still, in his own words he will remain an alien. Social distance reduces empathy. It revels in the spectacle, in the bizarre; creating the other from those who belong. Forcing them to be as tired, as strange and as lonely as the lensmen.
White South Africans will generally attest to their feelings of foreignness. As settled sedimentation of the colonial project, they feel themselves existing in place of porcelain fragility, as though one day, the 500 year old system that maintains them might just give out right under their feet. Their pedagogy allows for them to feel like outsiders, while never recognising those who belong. They can create “the other”, centering themselves as the norm and still feel as though they validly occupy the margin. Sean Meterlerkamp speaks as though his images are self-portraits, every snap containing pieces of him; but when he raises the camera to subjects similar to himself, he can not allow them to occupy the frame. He can not allow himself to occupy the frame. And this then is the idiosynchrasy- the imagined porcelain fragility of whiteness.