VERSO (2010-2011)

I continued to explore the relationship between the recto and verso side of these family photographs in another project, Dear Fusia, 2015-2016.

This body of work was exhibited in a two-person exhibition titled Still, Life with Terry Kurgan at the AOP Gallery, Johannesburg, 2011.

VERSO (catalogue text for exhibition of Still, Life, jointly with Terry Kurgan, AOP Gallery, Johannesburg, 2011).

Over the past few years, I have been scanning old family photographs – sometimes creased and scuffed, often ambered by time and light – in an attempt to constitute a digital archive. I’ve thought about such photographs as time capsules: amulets against oblivion and loss, their particular arrest holding a vanished moment. As a profligate snapper of everyday life, I am also  (nostalgically) intrigued by the time when a single photograph staunchly or tenderly memorialised an event. Family members or friends marshalled to pose and smile in speckled sunlight; a still life of fruit casually resplendent upon a table; a dog long dead lending its quirky humour to the scene.

It is a commonplace that our individual recollections are both sustained and constructed by family photographs. The older photos, those that precede our personal historical time, join one another to constitute small clusters of collective memory (and collective amnesia); the more recent ones in which we ourselves appear wanly from another time, serve as mnemonics. These stills become prompts and then, more securely, ‘memories.’ The project Still, Life (2010-2011) consisted of some two hundred pencil drawings based on this family archive; the rendering is deadpan and almost illustrative, as there was no desire to mine these images for any interiority, and the installation was in impersonal and randomly arranged grids.

At the same time, I felt drawn to, and fascinated by, the reverse side of each  photograph, the story it tells, the way in which it attests to the photograph not only as image, but also as material object. Some of these photographs have handwriting on the back, either dedications – where the photograph was considered as a gift or memento – or descriptive inscriptions of time and place. In yet others, the handwriting is from another, later period, with a family member (sometimes myself) attempting to fix the identity of the photographic protagonists.

I was also fascinated by the painterliness and wonderfully evocative ‘thingness’ of the verso side of these photographs, the way they seemed to occlude – and reveal – a ghostly pastness.  Their mottled surfaces are exquisite abstractions,  evocative of Gutai or Abstract Expressionist splodges, in shade of malt. The torn, map-shaped black blotches are remnants and reminders of an earlier existence in an album. In other words, the backs, like the images, are indexical traces, and as such, constitute a kind of (reverse) image.

Verso 1 was an installation of mounted photographic prints, where each print was approximately the size of the original photograph. These were shown together with the drawings (AOP Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2011.) I am now working on Verso II, where an alteration/dislocation of scale more dramatically highlights the recurring existence of these physical objects as image, revenants in another form. Their physicality and painterliness is now underlined by the scale and material. The works here shown are low-res working pictures of images which, in high res, are printed on large, matt,  Hahnemuhle ragpaper (310gms). Each ‘verso’ side contains the faint ghost of its recto, and in this conflation, the photographs tell yet another story, at once of a material object and of a nomadic narrative of which this image is a fragmentary, constitutive part.