Some SA voices…
I’ve come across some interesting South African artists blogging: something a little different from the usual mindless “my suicide/ depression/ bulimia diary” or “Rugby / soccer and how it controls my mental state of well-being” which is so often the content of South African blogs.
Nathaniel Stern is a self-styled Digital Artist, who relocated here (to Johannesburg) upon marrying a South African gender studies and anthropology academic who lectured me at university, Nicole Ridgway. His blog is terribly pretentious and promotes the carefully policed image that the circle of South African fine artists is closed, narcissistic and incestuous, and prides itself on being inaccessible and self-congratulatory. But I am terribly fond of Nicole (I understand they have just given birth to a baby daughter Sid) and Nathaniel has some interesting insights none the less, particularly on American politics.
Through Nathaniel’s blog, I discovered the photography of Aryan Kaganof, which is striking and quite unforgettable. This guy just picks up his camera and wanders the streets of Johannesburg photographing people he meets. The images are so striking, they really are, and the more you look at these portraits the more you learn to “read” the people’s lives in their faces. It’s a great project: everything that photography can be, in my opinion.
golden beagle
this review originally appeared here
May 19th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
mercifully we never had our Vienna ( except in the charcoal minds of some nostalgic weimaraners) -but we do have our karl kraus , our jonas mekas and our georges bataille rolled into one crazy unoccupiable, overflowingly generous space-called kaganof