I worked for the Sunday Times as a press photographer, early days, so I guess it’s only fair that they return the pound of flesh in review form. The review is by Oliver Roberts with whom I shared an immediate rapport.
Funnily enough the Rapport newspaper was one of the rags which didn’t review the show. Please also find paper reviews by the STAR, Mail and Guardian and the Citizen as well as a radio interview with SAFM’s Michelle Constant.
Matthew Patridge’s Mail and Guardian review:
The Road Trip
The road trip is never just about the road itself, its about the story that the road takes you on. As a medium, photography seems naturally suited to genre of the road trip. As a catalogue of time, its series of tangential points are designated with the immortalising importance, however minute, of the direction of the photographers’ lens.
Dave Southwood’s latest exhibition, ‘N1’ at the Goethe Institute on Jan Smuts Ave, is a just such a case in point. Using the N1 as an alibi for taking other pictures that parallel the journey, Southwood brings closer an investigation of the surfaces and textures of the classic road trip.
The N1 is a stretch of road that begins at the northern end of Buitengracht Street in Cape Town, just before the entrance to the waterfront, ending at the Beit Bridge borderpost on the Limpopo River. As a highway, it is one of the country’s main arteries, sluggishly meandering through five provinces.
One would therefore expect landscape to be the predominant feature in such a show. However Southwood’s desire for his to pictures to ‘communicate as phenomena’ in an almost ‘pre-cognitive state’ means that the nuances of everyday life are allowed to strongly permeate through the narrative of the exhibition.
Petrol stations naturally feature. Yet, in a testament to Southwood’s deliberate intention not to lock down an experience of the road and journey, they are not as you would expect. Rather they are suggested as points and gestures along the lies of a narrative, through subtle intimations such as colour and the lonely drift of people milling about outside a service stop.
The cracked porcelain of a wash hand basin in a dimly lit truck stop echoes the recurring, mundane experience that the show charts. Yet this tiny observation is juxtaposed with soaring and grand topographies. In an exquisitely printed image of a truck crossing a misty bridge, the tonal gradation of this invisible plane of vapour allows the viewer to become lost in the transience of the experience.
A single signpost against a blue sky on a barren lanscape reads ‘Love the Road Ahead’, whilst the horizontal red and yellow lines through the car window in another shot speaks of a respite from that very road. In this sense the exhibition takes us through a series of beginnings and ends, illuminating the distance inbetween. Attesting to this is the titles of the works which only provide the geographical co-ordinates of where each image was taken.
In this way the viewer is left to make sense of each picture themselves, giving Southwood’s unique mode of storytelling a typically open end. As style itself becomes a narrative mechanism, the medium colour format enhances the visual experience. The bright pink of jersey in the midday sun is blown out against a vivid azure sky.
What is more impressive is the range of photographic space and depth that the series investigates. In one of the few images of the actual N1, when the road narrows into single lanes as it passes through a jagged cut out section of hill, the detail in the shadows is fully visible. Here the technical ability of rendering a flash lit subject becomes a central concern of the work, giving the landscape an illuminating presence.
Considering the recent petrol crisis in the country, this exhibition serves make visible that which is normally disregarded through the tedious routine of travel. The ordinariness of a broken window-pane and the decomposing carcass of a cow is celebrated as a arc on a journey that dares to look and contemplate beyond the banality of blinkered everyday vision. Southwood’s images sift through the roadside junk, exploring light looking for, but not casting, meaning.
Runs until 14th – 26th July at the Goethe Institute on Jan Smuts.
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