Current Review(s)
'Rising Up Together'
Gille de Vlieg at Durban Art Gallery'The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, "There is the surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way."' (Sontag)
In the tumultuous 1980s in South Africa, Gille de Vlieg, a Black Sash anti-apartheid activist, began documenting what was going on around her. The camera became a vehicle through which to capture and represent what was happening in one of the more volatile times in South Africa’s recent history. In 1984 she joined Afrapix alongside other prominent struggle photographers such as Paul Weinberg and Omar Badsha (amongst many others). Unlike many of her counterparts, de Vlieg received little public acclaim for her work up until now.
The 1980s was a significant period in South Africa’s history, in many places something akin to civil war was more than bubbling under the surface. The government declared several states of emergency and the fabric of apartheid began increasingly to rupture. The controversial work of ‘The Bang Bang Club’ in the early '90s focused on documenting township and hostel violence and police brutality, and has reached some degree of notoriety recently as a Hollywood production. In contrast, De Vlieg’s work shows the everyday realities of living and struggling under apartheid rule. This exhibition includes a number of photographs of urban and rural life, politics and struggle under apartheid in the '80s. Unlike a great deal of fleeting photojournalism, de Vlieg’s images display an intimacy that compels the viewer to wonder what the reality must be like beyond the image.
02 September 2009 - 23 September 2009
Listings(s)
'Rising Up Together'
Gille de Vlieg at Durban Art Gallery'Rising Up Together' chronicles the work unsung documenter and activist Gille de Vlieg whose photographs of the resistance movement in Apartheid South Africa offer a powerful document of the times. De Vlieg, who had joined the Black Sash movement, took up the camera as a way of recording events for future generation. In 1984 she was invited by Paul Weinberg to join Afrapix and became intensely involved with documentary photography in rural and urban areas. Her images have been published in newspapers, magazines and books nationally and internationally but De Vlieg herself has achieved little recognition. This exhibition, which premiered at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown earlier this year, should go some way toward changing that fact.
02 September 2009 - 23 September 2009
