Tag: africa

South African photojournalist Uviwe Mangweni has a way of getting so close to her subjects that you can almost see them breathe. Having grown up in Cape Town, she now lives in the creative centre of Johannesburg where her focus is on documenting the places and moments that most people miss. One early project took her to the ex-mining town of Durban Deep - a run-down locale largely overlooked by cosmopolitan Johannesburg - where she spent a week with its people who scratch out a living with the most basic of amenities. More recently, back in the city, she took her camera to the dozens of hair salons in the business district to capture the hum and buzz of these social hubs. Dazed caught up with Uviwe to find out more about her work, what makes something catch her eye and where she wants to take her camera in the future. 

What drew you to using a camera to tell a story? 
Mostly being bored with life in my university days and just wanting to get out there and create something. A youthful restlessness I suppose. 

Who in the world of photojournalism are you inspired by and why?
To be honest I never aspired to be like anyone, I just did what I did because I felt like it. But when I began understanding the significance of photography, especially in South Africa, I began looking up to the legends like Peter Magubane and Alf Khumalo.

You often shoot in black and white - what drives that?
That usually comes in the editing process. I don’t know, maybe I have a bit of an old soul that wants to recreate the same depth and feeling we see in historical images. But I do shoot in color a lot too. 

There's a very intimate, relaxed quality to your photographs. Is that something you look to achieve?
Yeah, I try to capture people in their most natural way of being. I want to be invisible to them.

What was the idea behind your black hair salon series?
Black hair salons are all over the city of Johannesburg. It feels like there is literally one on every block. One day when I was doing my hair as I frequently do, I just thought about how they are huge part of the socio-economic landscape but they’re hardly captured or recognized.

What is about them that fascinates you?
One can't ignore those colorful murals used to advertise the salons. It's interesting cause they all depict international celebrities and hip hop artists and, a lot of the time, a hairstyle will be named after these celebrities. Also fascinated by how so many salons will occupy the same area in the CBD [the central business district] and almost all of them will survive as a business.

What was your eye drawn to when you photographed them?
I was drawn to the characters in the space at the time and how they interact with one another. There's always a little bit of drama or comedy in cases where the hairstyle did not come out the way it was supposed to.

Could you give a little background to the ex-mining town you photographed?
Durban Deep is an ex-mining town off Main Reef Road, West of Johannesburg. People who reside there are mostly migrants from neighboring cities and countries. They get on with life with no electricity and communal water pumps. It felt ghostly, a stark reminder of SA’s brutal past and how far we still have to go as a country in terms of real redistribution.

How did the town's inhabitants feel about you photographing them?
Initially people were uncomfortable, one would walk past and some people would shut their doors at the sight of a lens. But I kept going back and the more I related to them and explained what my mission was, the more they opened up. Just basic human decency and respect gets you a long way.

Are there other sides of Johannesburg you would like to document?
Yes, I would like to capture more stories that project the vibrance and rich creative culture in this city.

Where else would you like to take your camera in the future? 
(Laughing) I wanna take it everywhere.  But I need to get out more, spend more time on the peripheries of the urban environment. 

William S. Burroughs is cemented in the popular imagination as the archetypal literary outlaw, the third part of a holy trinity of Beats; father to Ginsberg’s son and Kerouac’s ghost. Novels including Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch pioneered a new and uniquely American literary form, shamanistic and paranoid, sanctifying the outsider. But Burroughs’ experiments in form and creative process extended beyond writing into film, sound and the visual arts, and he spent much of his later years in Kansas making paintings. A selection of those works can be seen in All out of time and into space at October Gallery, London.

In advance of the opening I caught up with Kathelin Gray, founder of the Theater of all Possibilities and a close friend of Burroughs, to talk about the man, his paintings, and how the mythology surrounding the most American of artists might impede our appreciation of his work.

Burroughs is best known here as a writer, so I wonder if you could expand on the relationship between his literary and painterly practice.

Burroughs had associated with artists through the forties and fifties, the era of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. He was very influenced by process art, recombinant art, by art that incorporated incorporating text into paintings, and he was always concerned with the relationship between word and image. Burroughs thought in images, in symbols, and that’s visible in both his writing and his painting.

How influential was Brion Gysin on Burroughs’ work as a visual artist?

Gysin and Burroughs began to collaborate in Paris in 1959, when they were living together in the Beat Hotel. Gysin had steeped himself in the cabbalistic traditions of North Africa and his work drew heavily on ritual and magic; that influenced Burroughs, who was more scientific in his approach. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut up too – he realised one day, when he was cutting through newspaper with an Exacto knife, that the strips could be recombined and the word sequences re-examined.

What was so attractive about the cut up technique to Burroughs?

He saw it as a means of undermining the power structures that govern the behaviour of the populous. Burroughs was constantly trying to get at the way that things are programmed beneath the surface. The cut-up technique was one of the tools by which he did this, but not the only one.

What were the other tools, the other processes? With respect to the paintings I’m thinking of those abstract compositions creating by taking a shotgun to a can of spray paint…

Well I think Burroughs and Gysin met [auto-destructive artist] Gustav Metzger at one of his early lectures at Cambridge. Metzger was fed up with the commodification of art and was trying to get back to the act, the essence of what’s done by the artist in the moment of creation. That was another influence.

But Burroughs didn’t start painting until late in his life?

Burroughs really began painting in 1987, in Kansas, the year after Gysin died. Burroughs was devastated by Gysin’s death – he was the only man he ever truly respected as a man and an artist. You know, Burroughs only really started writing after he killed his wife Joan [in a drunken and famously ill-advised game of William Tell], and I think that taking up painting represented another way of working through trauma.

What of the way that Burroughs is perceived now?

I’m really not keen on the Burroughs stereotype of him with the needle in his arm and the three-piece suit, because that’s not what he was.

You don’t think he deliberately cultivated that iconography?

He cultivated the iconography but not the stereotype. I wouldn’t say that he resented the stereotype – it’s just that it’s counterproductive when it comes to understanding his work.

He was always keen to dissociate himself from the Beat Generation, which hasn’t stopped him being lumped in with them by posterity. How did he consider his work, and that of Gysin, to be different from that of Kerouac, Ginsberg or Gregory Corso?

He was a close friend with Ginsberg, particularly, but he wasn’t like the Beats – he wasn’t a Buddhist, he wasn’t Zen, he didn’t like jazz, he wasn’t cool. Burroughs’ work was about deconstructing the hypnotic effect on human nature of the corporate world, the military-industrial complex, and the military-educational complex. He was extremely concerned by the ecological devastation of the planet, by terrorism, by the militarisation of society, and he deeply wanted to create tools that would allow the individual to think for themselves. That drove everything that he did.

Benjamin Eastham