kagablog

michelle son and abraxas caelan kaganof, cape town, 16/09/09

“I’ve quit my old life and sold all my blongings. With the money I bought this guitar and my amplifier. From now on I’m only working for Him… I make music for the Lord.”

Paul Karolus, N7, outside Citrusdal, Western Cape, South Africa

32°30′46.25″S
18°58′3.61″E

photo stan engelbrecht

MISS BEAUTIFUL
SOUTH AFRICA IN PAGEANTS
STAN ENGELBRECHT & tamsen de beer
DAY ONE

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology gives pageant as a late medieval word of unknown origin meaning a “scene acted on a stage, esp. in the open-air performances of the miracle plays” or, alternately, with less reference to specifically Biblical sources, ” a series of tableaux, a brilliant spectacle”.

The brilliant spectacle of the miracle of the Rainbow Nation repeated ad nauseum like a mantra would appear to inform Stan Engelbrecht’s latest investigation into South African identity.

Miss Beautiful follows on the runaway critical and commercial success of African Salad, a book whose recipe was revealingly simple: South Africans are what we eat.

An appropriately glib slug line for Miss Beautiful might be “South Africans are what we aspire to look like”.

But who is “we”? Of course Engelbrecht has been very careful to cover all the politically correct bases - we have black, white coloured and indian pageants, not to mention moffies, bikers, transvestites (Miss Gay Disco Queen Chedino Rodriguez: “I look better than most women in a bathing costume.”) and even AIDS sufferers (Mr. HIV/Aids-Awareness). This inclusivity is laudable but the photographs themselves reveal that all is not quite what it seems on the stage where these scenes are being acted out. The repressed has a way of revealing itself, of returning.

The photograph is of Calvinia Meat Festival Queen, Rika Van Zyl and her family in their kitchen. Rika is smiling broadly, the “Feeskoningin 2008″ sash worn on top of her green jacket is obviously a very good reason to smile. Her left arm is raised in order to hold her two sons who are both pre-teen, both smiling equally broadly. On her right is Rika’s hubby, Mr. Van Zyl who has his left hand on her left shoulder, his smile is somewhat different from those of Rika and the kids in that it doesn’t display as many teeth but he certainly does look very proud. Thus far nothing strange.

But the an Zyls are standing behind the kitchen table which is strewn with raw meat. A huge pile of lamb chops, as many as fifty choice cuts. It is in this strange, surrealistically perverse juxtapostion of the celebrating pageant queen and her family next to the evidence of the slaughter that will become the feast, that Engelbrecht manages to go beyond registration, beyond mere docucmentation, and provide the possibility of autoptic analysis of the beauty pageant phenomenon.

Miss South Africa Megan Coleman describes herself as “another blonde white girl” and you can’t miss South Africa. It’s that direction without a name on the bottom of the continent. Engelbrecht has gone in search of the elusive grail of South African identity only to discover that the scene enacted on the stage has been a charade instead of the much-hyped miracle of new nationhood. All we really have in common is our love affair with meat.

Aryan Kaganof

this review was first published in art south africa vol 07 issue 03 summer 09

Crown jewels: Little Miss Skwatta Camp, Balungile Zikalala, flanked by her princesses, holds up her rain-soaked prize for a portrait in Engelbrecht’s Miss Beautiful anthology.

Stan Engelbrecht’s study of local beauty — from Miss Gay Disco Queen to Mr HIV/Aids Awareness — is lovely beyond any singing, writes Aryan Kaganof.

Photographer Stan Engelbrecht has graciously agreed to accompany me to a specialist store to advise on selecting a new digital camera. It’s hilarious to watch the store attendants rush up and down as Engelbrecht barks out the model numbers of cameras and lenses, which he sternly commands I must heft in my hands before I even think about making a decision.

Everyone in the store knows him by name, and well they should — the Hasselblad photography system he invested in to capture the works in the soon-to-be-published Miss Beautiful cost almost as much as your average city bowl lock-up- and-go. After an hour of weighty colloquy about f-stops, apertures and depth of field, I’ve had enough and we retreat to Greenmarket Square to discuss the imminent launch of his new book.

Digital cameras are a subject that Engelbrecht knows something about, having used them on a daily basis for more than a decade. When I first met him in 1999, he was teaching photography at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town. He was then an intense young man with steely blue eyes that burned with the driving ambition to exhibit. Seven years later his limited edition book of photographs featuring Namibia’s feral horses was published by Bell-Roberts Publishing, whose Contemporary gallery also gave him his first exhibition.

The Caution Horses was a deeply romantic black-and-white series, which treated his subjects so lovingly you’d have thought they were human, set against the tremendous backdrop of the Namib desert — think Sally Mann meets Ansel Adams. By the time of his breakthrough, African Salad, however, Engelbrecht had moved on from the too-easily-beautiful aesthetics of his black-and-white phase in favour of a ruthlessly clean, almost puritanical look that lent evidence to his Calvinist upbringing.

The unfussy photographs in a crisply designed coffee-table book touched a chord in the South African public and the book has not stopped selling. It’s currently in its third reprint .

Unpretentious is how one could describe African Salad, which Engelbrecht himself calls “a photographic trek to find lekker South African flavour”. Simmering beneath the ostensibly simple cookbook collection, however, is a complex tapestry of miniature meditations on the nature of South African national identity.

It’s this fascination with identity, with finding out who we really are, that thematically links African Salad to the new book, Miss Beautiful, which explores the subculture of the beauty pageant.

The range of the pageants covered in the book is broad to the point of near absurdity. There’s Mr Premier Foods HIV/Aids Awareness next to Ms Matieland; Little Miss Skwatta Camp back to back with the mainstream Miss South Africa 2007, Megan Coleman.

All the rainbow hues are represented in the collection as well as some that are almost off- colour — Mr Six-pack, Mr Reach for a Dream, and the priceless Miss Gay Disco Queen, Chedino Rodriguez.

Engelbrecht is uncomfortable when I ask him if he thinks of himself as an art photographer. “Look, the book is the result of a collaborative process. For me the subjects, the people I take the pictures of, are as much artists as I am. We really take these pictures together. Their signatures are as much in evidence as mine.”

It’s a strong statement and delivered with so much conviction I might even be tempted to believe him, but Miss Beautiful is too heavily steeped in the framing authority of an artist, in the mystique of the Hasselblad (fixed lens, 50mm), in the sturdy eye of a beholder who wants to look further, to go beneath the skin, as it were, of what these beauty competitions are about.

“I find it very hard to talk about my work. I don’t talk about my work with anyone. It’s an entirely internalised process,” he continues. “All my thinking about photography comes out in the photographs themselves. It’s all there to see. I’m not that comfortable translating my thoughts into words.”

Strangely enough, this admission catches me off-guard, and I realise I’ve known Stan Engelbrecht for 10 years and in all that time this is the first conversation we’ve ever had about photography.

“When I started doing photography I found it impossible to take photographs of people, just to go up to them and ask if I could take their photograph. So I chose the horses instead. The feral horses outside Aus in Namibia, they were easier for me to approach than anyone on the street here in Cape Town. As I’ve gradually become more confident, I’ve been amazed by how much I enjoy photographing people. I think that’s what you can see in Miss Beautiful. I discovered that I really love people.”

The shy, young romantic has matured and is now photographing his human subjects with the tenderness he used to reserve for horses. Miss Beautiful is a feel-good piece of contemporary South Africana that will be finding its way onto many a coffee table this season.

Miss Beautiful: South Africa in Pageants is published by Day One and will be launched during the Design Indaba in Cape Town, running from February 27 until March 1. For more information visit www.dayone.co.za

this article first appeared in the sunday times