When Netflix and a daily with a legacy of ‘nation-building’ teamed up for the paper’s 40th anniversary, they revived the art of the visual ode – and also provoked the perennial debate about cultural ownership. We trace the history and effects of photography in South African pop culture.
newspaper’s 40 years of existence as “The Voice of Black South Africa”, little was it aware of the nostalgic trip it was hauling us all on to. Ditto, the frenzied debate over artistic recognition it would spark.
The tribute feature would often consist of an editorial splash of archival portraits. Photo editors would contrast artists’ old photos with “look how they look today”. The most exciting of these features would either be style or fashion pieces in which contemporary artists and photographers clubbed together to recreate iconic moments of their favourite forebears.
In hindsight, the entire so-called Sophiatown Renaissance was, as it were, a cultural facsimile of the Harlem Renaissance. Both were literary raptures featuring small coteries of literary and jazz artists, as opposed to a full-scale social permeation of higher cultures, but they were instrumental in people’s self-worth and later creation of mythology.
The backhanded culture of homage is not restricted to print. Nor is it restricted to the digital image-making and worshipping practice. Netflix and Sowetan’s video collaboration also evoked other iconic moments in electronic media innovation and expression.Jackson, a student of all golden eras, and director Mark Romanek raided archival footage of the South African and West AfricanIn photo-frame after photo-sequence, the pop starlet played the role of a Sophiatown lounge singer.
The resulting behind-the-scenes video clip showcasing the rendition of this visual time-travelling Black-to-the-Future is exquisite. It opens with an establishing aerial shot over the city of Johannesburg’s Art Deco architecture, and its traffic, before homing in on the artists at work. And yet none of the original photographers whose work has now been reprised have been acknowledged in monetary terms, nor do they own their “compositions”.has been running a stellar series of profile spotlights on the photographers to whom the Netflix project is paying backhanded tribute. From that series, one appreciates the deep pain, even erasure, to which this project – which could have celebrated them – unintentionally subjects them.
This incident also reminds us that photography, on its own, is a technological response to the tableaux of its surroundings. That it is, at its best, responsive to the moments presented: it is history’s roving third eye. I’m not as impartial in this as I might have had you believe. As an author, public arts curator and photography theorist, I am, in essence, a student of history – its grand gestures as well as the small stuff culture consumers do not usually sweat over.
The Black Consciousness leader working in Soweto, Dr Abu Baker Asvat, had recently been assassinated in cold blood. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s football club, in yellow and black apparel, was the most feared bunch on the streets, far away from the pitch. From the minute Brenda slipped on her beautifully beaded white gown with its elaborate stitch-work, in her mother’s bedroom, to the minute she arrived back from the church service a married woman, the air swirling around her was nothing less than chaos manifest.
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