Who do you like? Why?
by Sean O'Toole
A while back now, ArtThrob approached a number of photographers asking them to reveal which of their contemporaries (or peers) they admired. "But that's so limiting," some complained. Others simply declined the request. However, a few photographers graciously took the time to answer the simple question posed. Some even went further, stating why they were inspired by the photographers they listed.
Caroline Suzman:
Guy Tillim
Andrew Barker
Sipiwe Sibeko
Johannesburg-based Caroline Suzman trained under Obie Oberholzer. Her work ranges from pointed social documentary studies to richly coloured images that evince an interest in the rich patina of life in South Africa.
Marc Shoul:
Tim Hopwood: Tim was a student of Obie Oberholzer and has taken what he has been taught and turned it upside down to achieve colour and mood that few can achieve with their images. Constant experimentation with outdated film, cameras and lenses as well as a general enthusiasm for images is what makes Tim a great photographer.
Jodi Bieber: Her documentary images make you stop and look hard. Jodi pursues subject matter that few dare to document, and often returns with complex compositions. She has the ability and stomach to photograph in what seem to be very difficult and dangerous places.
Jillian Lochner: Jill includes information in her images that I think few would be brave and honest enough to do. Her images have the ability to be disturbing, with anything from, for example, the cold blue skin tones and textures she achieves, to images of cows pissing. This all makes for very interesting subject matter. I like the quirky honesty her images contain.
Johannesburg-based Marc Shoul is a graduate of Cape Town Technikon. His portraiture demonstrates a deep human empathy, while the unusual geometric line of his urban landscape studies gives the banal a poetic character.
Jillian Lochner:
Jane Alexander: Looking at her work sparks something in me, it touches me, it drives and inspires me and I constantly have to get my dose of it. I visit the Butcher boys often. When I look at her images, I feel there is a place out there I haven't yet visited. I want to go there.
Lee Snelgar: She has an incredible way of looking. At age 21 this is somewhat mind-blowing. She will be a photographer. Lee has no images yet, but then photography is all about light - and hers just hasn't been exposed on paper yet.
Jill Lochner: I drive myself. Looking at the pimple I have left on the face does it for me. I think if I have to look at another retouched, soul-less image I will jump off a building.
Cape Town-based Jillian Lochner is a graduate of Port Elizabeth University. Although she works predominantly in the fashion and advertising fields, she signalled a shift into the gallery with the launch of her book SNLV last year. Her highly stylised private work is less ambivalent than it is enraptured by surface textures and, at times, stages intensely autobiographical information.
Andrew Barker:
I think the fundamental reason I like photography is that I refuse to accept the idea of a "brutal disappearance". I cannot conceive a click. This is why I write this, hoping to save something so we can just see some photographs linger a while longer. Strange that those that do make great photographers understand that they are not simply making images (as anything may be an image) but rather "making an interpretation of the real, it is also a trace of something directly stencilled of the real, like a footprint or a death mask". I also believe that there is not a single approach to something remembered. Just do it well. "What cannot be done without heart had better not be done at all."
Cape Town-based Andrew Barker works with super large format cameras. At times, his work is invested with undeniable classicism, and also often demonstrates an interest in landscape and still life.
Jo Ractliffe:
This is a difficult thing, because there are a lot of people who have bits of work - select images/ series of images - that I'm really taken by, and/ or think are important works for a particular time. For instance, Roger Meintjies' 'Van Riebeeck's Hedge' is one of the most amazing, and I think critically important series of South African photographs, and also Ernest Cole's House of Bondage.
I like what I have seen - though admittedly, it's not much - of Dave Southwood's work, also, some of Abrie Fourie. Also Jeremy Wafer, and despite the fact he's not seen as a photographer; I think they're amazing. Jane Alexander's photomontages are also high up on my list (actually, now that I think of it, she may have to be one of the three), but it's a very different thing if I'm looking at photographers in terms of whole bodies of work, i.e. their careers over time.
So that's what I've done, and these are the people I don't even have to think about:
Guy Tillim: I like particularly his poetic sensibility (I'm quite envious of it actually); the formal qualities in his work - how he sees, the way he structures his images, his ability to transmit a 'felt' quality alongside the visual in his images. In spite of his often-arresting material, his work is about more than the 'subject'. I don't quite know how to articulate it, but it's something that makes him stand out for me - especially from other work of that "genre" (for want of a better term) where so much of what is foregrounded is focussed on what the subject/ event/ moment photographed is about. In Guy's work, I have a sense of his presence, if not position, his (possible) ambivalence, or at least something "other" beyond the surface of things, which allows me to project into... and that's interesting.
Santu Mofokeng: Also a "poetic" photographer, but what makes him interesting also, for me, is his critical - and political - take on issues in photographic representation. I know it's not simply the image at work when I look at his images, but a whole host of other issues embedded in his process. His 'Black Photo Album' is an obvious example, but also his more recent landscape works, I think are really doing something very new.
David Goldblatt: With him it's more complex; how can anyone in this country not owe a huge debt to him? And there's lots of his work that doesn't particularly "move" me, but then again, with those works, his - often more for me - an almost anti-aesthetic, quite blunt and bland approach to his material is curious (I think he's a great "non" photographer, in that his pictures often skirt around things, with things so understated as to be almost not there). If I had to make a selection of my "best" photographs of all time, those amazing "stand-out photographs", there are lots of pictures of his that would be there.
Johannesburg-based Jo Ractliffe has been unfairly (and incorrectly) labelled a 'conceptual' photographer. Her multiple frame images, for instance, evidence a deep distrust for the coded language of photography, particularly the authority single images claim in representing the truth. The illusiveness of her work, however, belies the fact that it is often documentary.
