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Not No Place
“On any journey in a South African city one will encounter the fake and the informal. Moving from the interior of Sandton’s Sun Hotel, one will drive past informal traders, before reaching the highway, which would take you to the inner city, where you would encounter an outdoor market for traditional medicine, next to men’s outfitter shops at the same address since the 1950’s.” (Bettina Malcomess)
This photographic project was a collaboration between myself and art writer Bettina Malcomess for an art grant from a German magazine, Neon. In 2013 the Sandton Sun lobby and the Men’s Outfitter’s interior photographs were published in a book called Not No Place. Johannesburg. Fragments of Spaces and Times. This collaborative project between Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Malcomess takes one on a textural and visual journey through Johannesburg past, present and imagined.
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Photographic Collages
I am fascinated with creating joiner photographic collages. David Hockney who used this collage technique in the eighties has influenced me. Like Hockney, I find using this technique I am putting more time into a photograph. It feels like I am drawing with my camera and by doing so, I feel I am observing more, as opposed to capturing one dead moment in time. However my Joiner Collages are different from Hockney’s because my images unfold linearly in some kind of narrative or action, there are some absences in my work, whereas Hockney documents the whole scene completely. The absences guide the eyes around the composition, so that the audience sees what I have observed. It is up to the audience to use their imagination to fill in the gaps.
When I started experimenting with photographic collage, I used photomerge in Photoshop to blend and join different images together. For group exihibtions “Upstairs Downstairs” at the AVA in 2007 and “Readymade ” at Kizo gallery in 2007, I rewound to analogue photography and joined the collages by hand. This technique allowed me to create one of a kind art works that cannot be reproduced in the same way again. Layering photographic paper onto other photographic paper, the joins are noticeable, there are no “Photoshop tricks” to make these works seamless.
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Cloneurbia
The media attention focussing on genetic cloning sparked off my fascination with this area of research at the end of 2002. This was my interpretation of genetic cloning’s potential, a cloned reality created through digitally manipulated photographs, a parallel cloned reality of our present time.
An early component of this series involved photographing twins and I was intrigued by the inherent similarities between them. These genetic clones were further cloned using photographic processes. Cloned families followed, both conventional and less conventional ones. Family snapshots and studio portraits question and re/deconstruct notions of family and look at new family units in a cloned society.
Cloneurbia questions notions of truth associated with photography. At first glance the photographs act as a truth documents. It is on closer inspection that the digital manipulation becomes apparent as the clones reveal themselves.