The Market Photo Workshop
02.09 - 31.10.2024

Nestled in Newton, The Market Photo Workshop is renowned for hosting and holding South African photographers who have continuously left their mark on our national image-making archive. The present show in the space, Reflections: on Black girlhood, a curatorial endeavour by Danielle Bowler seeks to question and incite a site-specific joy, feeling, and play to perceptions of ‘Black girlhood’ that is shadowed by grief, trauma, and an adultification that severs the possibilities of innocence and play. 

Renowned photographer Ruth Motau, an alumna of the school, who has tenderly documented Black South African life over generations, opens the show with her iconic 1992 image of dancers from the Meadowlands Dance Group. The photograph placed alongside it, taken in 2023 also showcases a troupe, this time blurred with movement and pulls away from the previous image’s stillness. Nonetheless, both portray momentary Black girl freedom and movement, many decades apart. The exhibition is born out of a hybrid Zoom course, ‘Sighting Black Girlhood’, a shared collaboration between the  University of Pennsylvania and the University of Johannesburg, that ‘explored what it means to sight, cite, and site experiences of Black girlhood across South Africa, the USA, and the Caribbean.’ 

This transnational approach to dissecting a ‘Black girlhood’ is no small undertaking, however, within Bowler’s exhibition, the artists each independently approach the task from a sense of play, layered with earnest consideration. The exhibition explicitly makes girlhood and not womanhood an entry point, allowing black girls their moments of innocence and space to experience and reflect on their identities without being demonized or dismissed. Bowler cites Ntozake Shange, bell hooks, Christina Sharpe and other Black feminist scholars who further ground the show’s interest in expansive and nuanced representations of girlhood. 

Not solely confined to an academic exercise in citation, the show is deliberate and successful in imbuing a sense of play to these depictions of girlhood. Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s Spring Floor VI takes on a new form with the addition of a commissioned springboard (made in collaboration with Dion Monti) that encourages the audience to step into the tense world of an Olympic gymnast. The sign adjacent to the work, stating ‘Please feel free to put on the headphones and stand, jump, walk, perform or just be on the spring floor while you listen’ is the first opening to engaging with the tactility of Black girlhood. At the opening, laughter peels through the gallery as visitors take on the task of entering this moment of pretend– many delighted to be invited into this experience of play. Outside of an opening context, wandering alone, the invitation to play is saddled with a degree of seriousness, as the looped soundtrack with crowds applauding, or presenters commenting and or demanding a smile constructs a familiar aspect of Black girlhood – one that is brimming with energy but ceaselessly critiqued. 

The photographic collages of Lebogang Tlhako, embody a different kind of play – one where Black girls dress up and pose with borrowed clothing and accessories for confident self-representation. Tlhako situates herself within a legacy of African contemporary photography, one which stretches back to the 1960s, in which studios established by Sonlé Sory and Malick Sidibé on the eve of African independence captured Black people keen to show a novel age and embodiment of freedom. However, in contrast to these studios which were largely run by men, Tlhako attempts to situate the agency of women more firmly in her practice, by deliberately referencing the image-making of her Black mothers and grandmothers who built tangible archives in the keeping of family photo albums. 

In Bowler’s statement, she incites the image of ‘the refracted mirror’ to describe the ways in which these artists present a novel kind of portraiture – one that is ‘abstract, out-of-focus, poetic, and a tender… life-filled offering.’ With Haneem Christian’s photographic subjects that confront the camera, either twinned, comfortably seated, or beautifully made-up, this idea of the mirror is further uncovered. In their practice, which celebrates ‘gender abundance, themes of found family, and a queer image making that mirrors their own, the photographer describes their work as ‘an extension of my truth created with others whose truths align very deeply with mine.¹ https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/haneem-christian-photography-050122 ’

The second floor of the exhibition features two video works by Nkosi and Motlhoki Nono. Nkosi’s Suspension is a collage of Black and brown gymnasts posed before action – noses scrunched, eyebrows knitted, and a palpable nervousness that comes before their moments of brilliance. In contrast to Motau’s series A Day in the Life, which depicts the mundane moments at home, Nkosi’s video exhibits the tense instant before explosion, with athletes wearing relatable tense expressions.

At the far end of the room, Nono’s Ledombolo For One plays on a loop with a split screen of a pair of hands baking something that is never revealed to us. Fractured audio plays where, on one end the artist recites a poem, and on the other she holds a conversation with her mother about ‘making love’. This recipe is given through poetic metaphors, anecdotes, and poignant reflections which mother and daughter giggle and tease each other about, leaving a definite sweetness that hangs over their playful banter. In Nono’s digital collages (black noises), she places collaged family portraits covered in a bright candy – shielding those in the frame. Between these images, hidden in a nook on the wall, sits a pile of matching candy, giving further dimension and tactility to the works.

With Reflections: on Black girlhood, I am left with the sense of curatorial and artistic play – one which makes itself known with motion, the sonic, careful and deliberate process of image making, and research. These artists, across generations and mediums, are intent on calling upon a black girlhood that is shared, changing, feeling, and ultimately playful (in the most considerate and earnest of ways).