Posts Tagged ‘milnerton’

Milnerton Market

A book is the main vehicle for this decade-long project. This section contains layouts from the book, photographs from the project and  installation shots from the gallery show to illustrate some continuity in the way in which it has been presented.

The captions were supplied by the marketeers.

The Fourthwall(fourthwallbooks.com) site has a flip-through section which gives a sense of the book’s appearance. The book is hand-printed, hand-bound and has a silkscreened cover which was designed by Francois Rey of Monday Design. I would also like to note, in addition to the authors’ contributions, the support of the curator Clare Butcher.

From Fourthwall’s site:

For the last decade David Southwood has been observing, participating in and photographing the Milnerton flea market. In that time, he has seen subtle changes in one of the many “grey zones” of Cape Town, where a growing number of peripheral characters – mainly poor whites and recent migrants into South Africa – seek to earn a living through trade in second-hand goods. Milnerton Market has emerged from Southwood’s intense engagement as powerful record of a single community on the fringes of a society in flux.

On one hand, Milnerton Market simply bears witness to the hodgepodge life of things. But on the other, it explores the implications of the redistribution of resources by a new democratic government in the early 1990s, a process that did very little to alleviate the destitution of many. The geographic and symbolic “in-betweenness” of the site of the market – it is not sea, not city, not industrial, not prime property – and of the vendors themselves, perched on rickety deckchairs, suggests an uncomfortable unity of political rhetoric and acceptable public memory.

Milnerton Market comprises over one hundred powerful images (full colour and black and white) and includes essays by Ivan Vladislavić, Ivor Powell and Michael Godby.

An exhibition of the book’s contents was held in Cape Town in 2010. The installation shots appear at the end of the gallery.

 

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Seeing the lids of a box with transparent lids


It’s from this hotch potch of crap that I bought a very useful grey plastic toolbox/tackle box with two transparent lids.

When I scanned the neg and printed a small test I became convinced that I saw the lids, in ink on the paper print. It wasn’t on the table because I had purchased the box prior to this photo being made as a gesture of goodwill towards the static little community who waited patiently for passing guttersnipes.

It’s the same sort of quandry which Ivan Vladislavic addresses in my Milnerton Market book when he quotes Andre’ Breton:

‘André Breton, considering De Chirico’s fascination with certain objects (artichoke, glove, cookie, spool), writes, somewhat cryptically, ‘As far as I am concerned, a mind’s arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility.’ The patterning of objects rests not only with the things themselves but with the disposition of the mind of the observer.

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Milnerton site


The Milnerton site is nearly live. It’s modelled on the Google.com image search and has a spooky ghosting effect when the thumbs are moused over.

Kyle Morland programmed it.

I change it all the time because it’s in my nature.

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Gou gou! Tjoep tjoep! Nou nou! Milnerton Hoovers






In the middle part of my career I suffered the crisis of conscience which all photographers in Africa with half a brain(and a conscience) suffer. The making of portraits seemed like the taking of lives to me, so I began, like the Bechers, to photograph objects in a serial fashion.

The Milnerton Market suffered at the hands of my new occupation and hoovers, particularly, took a knock.

At the same time I read a text in an academic journal which was about ‘duplification‘ in the Afrikaans language. Repetition of a word like ‘gou’ indicates a certain peremptory quality, like ‘don’t do that thing now, do it right now!’

I thought that their domestic quality, and the repetition of the hoovers would be well suited to the text. The academic was less easy to persuade.

The author remarked that he had heard someone on a cookery show use the phrase, ‘Nou nou nou’

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