The Suburban nannies

What prompted my move to produce a photo story around Maria Shika was my long established fascination with the lives of domestic workers in South Africa. One only needs to go away from South Africa for a time to realise that the nurturing warmth that fills all the spaces is what is missing. Whether its the nanny yelling ‘meallies’ as she sways down the road, or the cackle of two nannies in conversation over a busy street, in the suburbs, nannies are the colour in this bland concrete jail we have retreated behind.

I am fortunate to come from a home where nannies – as I prefer to call them – were part of my upbringing. As soon as my mother had finished nursing me she set about starting a business from our home garage where she restored antique furniture. She couldn’t pick me up even if she wanted to, because she was permanently covered in paint stripper.

Another Maria was my first nanny. I still see her for tea once a year, but she ill now. I was carried on Maria’s back, tucked into a blanket pouch and fed pap until my cheeks exploded. When compared to my sister who had no nanny and has never even tasted pap, there is almost a foot in height difference between us. I am now taller than my father and we all blame my African mother for overfeeding me.

In the last few years that I have been establishing my own home, I have employed a housekeeper named Maria Shika. I have known her nearly thirteen years as she lives and works for my best friend. Now we share her and Maria comes to transform my home twice a week!

Maria is tiny – standing just 5’2” and her stature is certainly part of her charm. She is the most dignified, respectful woman I have ever met and she has become an intimate part of my life.

As I work from home as a writer, she has learned to tiptoe around me, reading my thoughts when I go looking for missing pens that have been left by the coffee machine and bits of notes and scrap paper that she has arranged in neat piles waiting for me to rediscover.

Every day I go for a long walk through the suburb at sunset and often encounter Maria sitting on the pavement talking with her friends. The Maria I meet outside of work is exuberant, laughing out loud and charismatic. So different to the quiet ghostly figure that stalks my passageways.

I asked her if I could follow her around the house with my camera – for school -  I said, and wait for the puzzled look to crease her features. Although she has lived in Joburg fifteen years, she often says she does not understand me. “My life in pictures?” she asks. “Yes, I reply, your life in pictures.” The universal language of pictures cuts me some slack.

After realising my technical inadequacy on my camera after battling the gloomy indoor light without a flash – determined to use those manual settings, a story has begun to take shape.

We have only just begun to scratch the surface of the diverse human being that Maria is.  I was privileged enough to be invited to her home in Diepsloot to meet her family and hopefully in time I will visit her in her real roots of Polokwane.

On my way back from a walk this past week, I passed Joanna and Anna who are regular pavement chatters. Joanna had her grandson, Phephile, with her and he was fascinated by the camera.

Maria’s photo story is just beginning, but already it has planted a seed for a broader study of work that will pay homage to all the super nannies in my hood.

The Life and Times of Maria Madira Shika

Photo Story   Maria Madira Shika  Compressed

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Diepsloot on a Saturday morning

Photo Story   Diepsloot On A Saturday Morning Compressed

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Gideon Mendel - Photographer or Activist?

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Caster Semenya - Representation in images

Critically evaluate how the images have been used alongside stories and
headlines - From the time of competition to now.
Do you think there has been an agenda as to how her photographs
have been used? Would you argue on any ethical issues?
Use some of the pictures or page layouts from newspapers to
support your argument.

Source: Badische Zeitung

A search on Google News reveals that the coverage surrounding Semenya's gender peaked in August 2009 after the story was broken by an Australian publication.

While few of the headlines over the last few months have been particularly scathing - instead often showing sympathy towards Semnya in her plight - , the choice of images that the media have used to accompany her story have not really aided her cause.

While there does not appear to have been any deliberate attempt by photographers to capture her in especially unfeminine behaviour - by virtue of her athletic lifestyle, Semenya is portrayed androgenously - as a professional athlete.

Gold Medal Runner Caught In Gender Bender

A proud village welcomes back Caster Semenya, its heroine 

What determines Caster Semenya's sex? 

To be continued....

 

Andre Kertesz (1894 - 1985)

At the end of the documentary I was left with two major sentiments, the first to never take pictures to please your critics and second that the perspective of your critics or your audience will always be a subjective one.

As the world looks back on the collective portfolio of Andre Kertesz it is apparent that he was immensely talented, but hugely undervalued in the prime of his life.
The documentary showed a man, saddened and beaten and perhaps even a little bitter over the efforts of his former critics to reach out to him in later life with awards for his lifetime of work. Given that the most successful period of his work was during the 1930’s in Paris, it would seem the accolades that began to mount during the seventies - came too late.

Born a Hungarian Jew, Kertesz fled to New York in 1936 in an effort to escape Anti-Semitic persecution in Europe. The acclaim that he had earned in Hungary and France quickly whittled away by American critics who found his work overly sentimental and his use of angles, unconventional – the very trademarks that made him successful. At the prime of his career, Kertesz the man who ‘wrote stories with light’ was reduced to a catalogue photographer for Garden and Home magazine.

At the same period in New York, however, photographers were producing sentimental and humanistic work all the time and being praised for it. Consider Hal Morey’s 1930 ‘Sun beams into Grand Central Station’ and Charles C Ebbett’s 1932 “Lunchtime atop a skyscraper” – which both could easily have been mistaken for Kertesz, imitating his composition, symmetry and contrast. It is difficult to know whether photography was shared across the Atlantic during the thirties, and which photographer may have set the precedent, but there certainly was a prolific volume of work produced from Paris, London and New York representing sentimental portraits of everyday life in the Kertesz Style.

His last published works of the glass bust really seal the tragedy of his life. Heartbroken over the loss of his wife and now living like a recluse in his New York Apartment, Kertesz captures the small glass sculpture in different light and perspective. Devoid of human characteristics, so vital a component to his former work, Kertesz’s last chapter appears to mock the establishment who are now willing to bestow all manner of awards on him regardless of his subject.

Representation in the works of African Photographers

Using pictures to develop an argument, unpack the following words from Elizabeth Edwards:

“Central to the nature of the photograph and its interpretive dilemmas is its insistent dislocation of space and time… Closely related to the temporal dislocation in a photographic context is spatial dislocation. In the creation of an image, photographic technology frames the world. Camera angle, range of lens, type of film and the chosen moment of exposure further dictate and shape the moment. Exposure is an apposite term, for its carries not only technical meaning, but describes that moment 'exposed' to historical scrutiny. The photograph contains and constrains within its boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge."

The above extract is taken from an essay written by Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya entitled 'Colonial Imagery, tropes of Disruption: History, culture and representation in the world of African photographers.'


The essay was specifically written to accompany a photographic installation that was on display at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1996. The exhibition was entitled ‘African Photographers, 1940 to present.’ Unfortunately the Guggenheim Museum only began making past exhibitions available on their online archive recently, and so the collection of images referred to cannot be viewed.

Without the visual references, a basic description of the exhibition informs us that the production included a selection of photographs from 30 African Photographers from diverse racial, cultural and spiritual and even geographical contexts.

The purpose of the exhibition sought to explore the perceptions of both Westerners and Africans in relation to Post Colonial Africa. With this background in mind, it becomes apparent why the authors chose to quote Elizabeth Edwards in their essay. Edwards is an academic lecturer at the University of Oxford who is regarded as a thought leader on photography as an anthropological tool. Her latest book published in 2004, ‘Photographs Objects Histories’ repeats many of the sentiments she raises in the essay published eight years prior.

Edwards in a nutshell:

The main theme introduced by Edwards suggests that as a result of the ‘dislocation of time and space’ as is uniquely possible through the technology of photography, the viewer is not given the historical context of the picture. But the photographer does have a certain power over his viewer by being able to  'dictate and shape the moment.'



The extract from Edwards – as is typical with academic writing is its unnecessary complexity. Her use of verbose language has a neutralising effect on her argument.

Edwards first introduces the concept that spatial dislocation is closely related to temporal dislocation and that this is the central nature of photography. However having made such a profound statement that manages to drill down to the snapshot essence of photography, she contradicts herself a paragraph later by spouting vague and broad phrases such as photographic technology being capable of ‘framing the world.’

Her argument takes yet another swerve when she returns to the snapshot concept using the technical term 'exposure' as an analogy for a 'moment in time'. Since the analogy fits well with her initial musings on the dislocation of space and time, her words regain some credibility, however she insists on steering her reader back into the fog with the introduction of more obscure theory - this time from Neoplatonists debating theories of interpretation.

The concept of a microcosmic analogue was introduced by James Coulter in his book entitled ‘the Literary Microcosm.’While Coulter quotes Plato as saying ‘A literary composition must resemble a living thing’, what Edwards appears to be attempting is the suggestion that only living photography or that which captures real life – like ‘living literature’ will succeed in framing time and space and therefore ultimately lead to knowledge.

While I find the overly complicated writing of the essay frustrating, I was able to distill some semblance of wisdom in her time and space theory.



To illustrate this, I've collected three black and white photographs of traditional rural scenes in Kenya. One of the images was taken in 1939, another in 1961 and the last in 2005. Each represents a vastly different social context from the others...

In my opinion, nowhere is the moral question of cultural integrity in relation to post colonial Africa more poignant than in the Maasai people. In present time, it is not uncommon to find 'Maasai warriors' serving curry at a buffet of a safari camp or to find Europeann tourists posing alongside Maasai people clad in tribal blankets, wedding necklaces with painted faces.

Key to reading the images:

This image of Kikuyu Children in Kenya befriending a European girl was taken in 1939. It is a famous image about a family who took refuge in Kenya after being persecuted as Jews in Europe and ultimately making Kenya their home.Other than the porcelain hand painted doll and possibly the costume of the little girl, there are few temporal clues as to the image's date.

This image was taken in 1961 by James Burke of the Evangelist Billy Graham talking to Maasai herdsmen. The image for me still suggests a strong sense of paternalism of European culture and spiritual beliefs over Africa. Perhaps without the background context of Billy Graham, the European man on the left could have been a tourist...in any time frame?

This image was taken off a tourism website promoting 5 day cultural tours with the Maasai. It was taken in 2005 and a throng of European tourists standing to the left of the image have been cropped out. The seeming authenticity of the gathering along with their clothing suggests to me that this image could have been taken at any time in the last sixty years, but it is the power of the photographer to 'dictate and shape the moment' that has compromised the integrity of this image as authentic documentation of culture.

The image on the right of a young Maasai man was taken at a cultural village outside the gate of the Masai Mara Game Reserve. He is employed at safari lodge in the reserve and much of his income is dervied from tourists wishing to take photographs alongside him. If the viewer is aware that this image is taken in a cultural village staged for tourists, does it still count as a legitimate cultural experience? Does the man int he photo, who earns his living as a tourist model rather than a herdsman, still qualify as a Maasai warrior?

Juxtaposition and cultural pollination is inevitable. But what comes next? Maasai warriors posing in top hats and tails alongside the Queen in Buckingham Palace?

Your comments are welcome....let the discussion begin