MOPP 2009 - Epigrams for the 21st Century

 Mitchell's Plain Library

My contribution for the Month of People's Photography 2009 was a series of various scenes from around the world containing or implying certain pithy exhortations, forming a mini-manual of 'Epigrams for the 21st Century'. These were inspired by an earlier series of photographs of the ubiquitous tabloid newspaper headlines seen on lampposts and at street corners around Cape Town, which led me to the idea that a photograph could contain its own caption. The photos were framed simply in black file folders under the heading of 'Pictures and Words' (inspired from a set of chinese tiles for children) meant to emphasize the universality of the messages they convey.

 Gugulethu Library

The theme for the 2009 exhibition was 'Maybe Tomorrow'. It was a landmark year, one which saw the cafe-circuit exhibitions augmented by a special traveling exhibition that spent one week each at four different venues in the Cape Flats: Gugulethu, Langa, Mitchell's Plain and Grassy Park, thus bringing photography within the reach of all Capetonians and not just residents downtown.

From the MOPP website:

This year’s theme, “Maybe Tomorrow” is expected to bring out peoples responses and personal ‘views’ of what tomorrow may bring in this time of change we find ourselves in both here in South Africa and around the Globe. Are you optimistic, skeptical…..even pessimistic about the future ?

Photographers are asked to submit images that best describe their thoughts on the possibilities offered by our future, or on the possible futures available to us, in any way they choose to interpret the theme.

Read more here.

See more images of the exhibition here.

Tsoga Community Centre, Langa

MOPP 2008 - One Long Street

 

This year, being geographically indisposed, I decided to create an on-line exhibition around the theme of 'Home Sweet Street'. Dubbed 'One Long Street', a title intended to be taken literally but referencing the famous Cape Town street at the same time, the series collected together street photographs from various locations taken from a head-on angle. I made minute adjustments and played with different orderings of the photos so that the lines and 'street level' of one would flow smoothly into the next. Placed side-by-side (after having discarded the idea of one long composite photomontage), they give the impression of a world connected by its lowest common denominator - the street.

 

The choice of a web medium for this series was a prescient one, as it probably got a wider exposure than it would have as a print exhibition. As reviewer Miles Keylock mused, the images "flatten the West’s global hegemony with images of Cape Town, Nagoya, Fes, Lisbon and other great urban centres of the world." Read the full review at the AvantAfro blog. The actual site was linked off the main MOPP page and is now archived here.

Photographer's statement from the original site:

Some say the street is the stage for the drama of life. I prefer to think of it as the spectator.
To the eyes of the doors & windows, to the ears of the lampposts & beaten pavement, through the dark alleys & gutters of dust & trash, nothing passes unnoticed.
The camera is also complicit in this gesture, which is universal across urban cultures. In the street can happen everything, and nothing in particular. These photos are snapshots of the latter, scenes in which life simply goes on until the next corner.

MOPP 2007 - The Blind Camera

The exhibition that would prove to be the inspiration for this website, The Blind Camera was a callback to the forgotten 'tactile' element of photography. The idea was simple: to create a series of pictures by and for the blind (really, when you think about it, a neglected demographic as far as photography is concerned). A colleague of mine, a former radio presenter who happened to be blind, used to type up scripts on a braille typewriter, which he showed me how to operate. Around that time I hit upon the idea of creating a braille 'image': a thematic sentence, written in braille, that would evoke an image. To the untrained eye (or finger), it would simply look like a pattern of dots, whereas inside would be hidden a vivid image.

I had my colleague help me to create 8 of these 'braille images', which I then mounted into proper matboard picture frames and presented as the 'real' photograph. On the other side of the same frame, I pasted an ersatz 'visual' representation of that vignette - that is, what the 'braille image' might evoke or look like to a disadvantaged 'sighted' person -  and surrounded it with braille paper on the frame itself.

Detail of exhibited print showing braille frame

I wanted people to feel the pictures as well, so I hung them unusually low, below the sightlines of most people, so that they would be obliged to grasp the frames to get a closer look, and in so doing feel the braille with their hands. The result was a tactile, textural photo experience.

 

The show was held at the Arternative Gallery on Long Street, in a basement space converted especially for the occasion. The theme was 'I spy with my third eye'. I proposed the blind camera as being that third eye, because since it can only capture and not interpret, in a sense it is blind as well.

Original text:

With two eyes we gain depth perception over one eye. Do we also gain another dimension with a third eye? The camera is blind; it can deceive but cannot judge. The true representation of these vignettes is in the pattern of raised dots. The images are simply the camera's conception of the artist's vision and only approximate the colour and richness of the original.

 

In addition, this year's MOPP presented for the first time a Portable Exhibition: a series of half-size posters, with images and interviews (collected by myself and others) from select members of the Camissa Collective. The Portable Exhibition was made available to libraries and community centers around Cape Town and beyond, with the goal of expanding MOPP's mandate of connecting and empowering people through still images. 

Read more about MOPP & the Camissa Collective here.

Read about the origins of the name Camissa here.

Read archived interviews with Mandla Mnyakama, Nadia Brown,  Francois Raubenheimer and RealRozzano.

Month of People's Photography 2007: The Portable Exhibition


Parker Mah 2007.