Section:GDN 12 PaGe:8 Edition Date:200415 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/4/2020 17:51 cYanmaGentaYellowbla Section:GDN 12 PaGe:9 Edition Date:200415 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/4/2020 17:51 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• • 8 The Guardian The Guardian 9 Arts Wednesday 15 April 2020 Wednesday 15 April 2020

Mom, 1988, by Alec Soth taken on the stairs of their home by Diener’s mother, who titled it on the Ka-Man Tse’s back: The Kiss. “I always thought Shame factor … Have you Holding this it was an interesting photograph Kai Luke photograph – strange and tender at the same Brummer, left, Alec Soth’s Mom; with Yeema I can’t be the time,“ says Diener. “It also works in Moffi e right, The Kiss by and Yee-jeung metaphorically for the kind of seen your Barbara Diener only buff who, relationship my father and I had. We were close, but there were barriers rooting in a we could never quite get around.” Since her father’s death 13 years fl ea market, ago, the snapshot has inevitably mother, baby? taken on an added resonance . found a photo “Losing him was one of those life- changing, earth-shattering events I and thought of am still processing today. Indirectly, my projects since his death convey a Henriette sense of loss or longing.” There is longing, too, in the two ‘It’s a triggering fi lm’ photographs chosen by Ka-Man Tse . The fi rst is a black and white Now, three years later and just group from 1964, taken by a relative Moffi e, about a gay conscript in the South African The Kiss, 1984, in time for Camera Lucida’s 40th at a family wedding. It is, she says, by Barbara Diener anniversary, England’s ambitious the earliest existing photograph army, gave one critic a panic attack – but director In Camera Lucida, project has come to fruition in a of her mother, who was 10 years photo book comprising the responses old at the time. “There she is,” says Oliver Hermanus is unrepentant. By Guy Lodge philosopher of more than 200 photographers, Tse, “sitting at the end of the table, writers and artists. Entitled Keeper looking directly at the camera, a Roland Barthes of the Hearth – the French meaning child amongst a table of adults, rom an outside perspective, keep asking the question, especially in South of the name, Henriette – it is by turns all women.” For her, it carries a South African cinema tends Africa: where does our toxic masculinity describes, but fascinating and bemusing. “Every similar resonance to the one Barthes to announce itself through come from? When I looked at it that way, as refuses to show, single response was included,” identifi ed in the snapshot of his occasional breakout fi lms an exploration of our past that informs our elaborates England . “Forefront in mother. “It’s the chicken in the F rather than consistently visible present, I was more comfortable with it.” my mind was the question: ‘Who am middle of the table, it’s the look in directorial careers. Back in the Van der Merwe’s novel had a more defi ned a photograph I to say what constitutes a valid or her eyes, the white socks and her 1980s, The Gods Must Be Crazy was a global hit romantic throughline; though Hermanus’s fi lm of his mum as a worthwhile interpretation?’ I didn’t shoes,” she elaborates, referencing that didn’t do much to raise the profi le of its outlines an attraction between protagonist weed anything out .” Barthes idea of the “ punctum ” – the director, Jamie Uys. Fourteen years ago, gritty Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) and a fellow girl. Forty years My contribution is a small portrait incidental detail that can unsettle township fable Tsotsi won the country one misfi t recruit, he deliberately downplayed mounted on time-blemished card the viewer with its poignancy. of its fi rst Oscars, only to send director Gavin the love story . “A key rule of mine from the later, a photobook of a young girl from another time, Tse’s other submitted image Hood directly into a profi cient but culturally very beginning was that there was going to be sitting on a chair in a garden, wearing shows fi ve female hands cradling anonymous Hollywood career. no kind of conventional love scene: it wasn’t pursues the a white cotton smock and fl ower- that family snapshot . “The hands In Oliver Hermanus , however, the country going to be a relationship drama,” he says. “It bedecked hat. A fl ea market nd,fi it on the right side of the frame are has produced its most signifi cant auteur in was going to be more about our connection mystery, writes is, in my mind at least, a portrait of my aunt, who was 71 at the time,” generations. The 36 -year-old Capetonian to this problematic era, and the generation of the young Henriette, poised and at says Tse. “She is in the photograph studied at the London Film School, but men who lived through that.” Sean O’Hagan ease in the camera’s gaze. On the she is holding, but as a teenager. returned home for his art. His 2009 graduation In doing so, Hermanus was prepared to opposite page, a fragment from The middle hand is mine, and I’m fi lm Shirley Adams, a tough mother-son be confrontational – taking the book’s title, Camera Lucida, also chosen by me, wearing my own wedding ring in portrait set on the Cape Flats, launched a career a common anti-gay slur, as his cue reads “… she triumphed over this Hong Kong where gay marriage it is marked by global critical acclaim. He stepped on that front. “I know it’s a very triggering ordeal of placing herself in front neither legal or recognised.” up to Cannes with Beauty , a startling study of fi lm – it had to be,” he admits. “We’ve had of the lens … with discretion … She The past haunts the work of a closeted Afrikaner that an overwhelming range of reactions to the did not struggle with her image, as Dan Estabrook, a conceptual artist made it to UK cinemas; fi lm in : some from gay men I do with mine: she did not suppose who uses 19th-century processing Mum said: ‘Why his third fi lm, The Endless who had been to the army and felt identifi ed The photograph herself.” That last phrase, describing techniques to make images that River , did not. and recognised, some from men who don’t found by the young Henriette, is pure Barthes, combine photography and collage. make another fi lm Moffi e , Hermanus’s necessarily acknowledge the fact that they Sean O’Hagan astute and playful. It evokes her “For the last few years, I’ve been about a white man poetic yet visceral fourth are still traumatised. One member of the press ‘T youthful poise and confi dence – and, using tintypes,” he says, referring to feature, feels like the had a panic attack at a screening. These are here I was, days ”. For Barthes, grief-stricken by extension, her breeding – and an early process in which chemicals one that will cement him common experiences but they haven’t been alone in the apartment where she by his mother’s recent death, Barthes’s own discomfort when were used to create images on metal, during apartheid?’ in the contemporary widely addressed in South African culture.” had died, looking at these pictures the snapshot somehow evokes posing for a portrait, a discomfort “which I cut up and reassemble like arthouse canon. A war Though the fi lm is set in the whites-only of my mother, one by one under the her “unique being”. He writes : many of us will recognise. jigsaw puzzles. ” fi lm that returns to the anxious queer terrain domain of the army, Hermanus doesn’t skimp lamp, gradually moving back in time “I studied the little girl and at last The American documentary In Estabrook’s collage, the young of Beauty, it has been collecting awards on depicting anti-black violence: “It was with her, looking for the truth of the rediscovered my mother.” photographer Alec Soth responded girl in the foreground has no face, and plaudits since premiering at Venice last a dangerous choice, I know, to have all of face I had loved. And I found it.” The appearance of the Winter with a portrait of his own mother her features having been replaced autumn . It’s his most accomplished fi lm yet, the black characters be physical objects, This poignant recollection occurs Garden Photograph is a pivotal Winter Garden by stretched out on a sofa, beneath a by an oval of polished silver that is though not his most personal: it adapts André victimised on the sidelines. But that’s how in Camera Lucida by the French moment in Camera Lucida, Dan Estabrook wall of family portraits, one of which a kind of mirror. “To be honest,” he Carl van der Merwe ’s semi-autobiographical it was: there’s a white gaze there, and we thinker Roland Barthes . Published shifting the narrative away from shows him as a young boy, grinning says, “I was a little embarrassed at 2006 novel, based on his experiences as a gay needed to see that.” He cites inspiration in 1980, it remains, alongside Susan the theoretical towards a personal and clasping a ball. His text reads, how literally I interpreted the projec t teenage conscript sent to fi ght in the South from the 2010 Abdellatif Kechiche historical Sontag’s On Photography , one of meditation on loss and photography’s “Twenty years have passed and so — I just wanted to make this unseen African border war in the early 80s. drama Black Venus – which depicted the the most infl uential books ever intrinsic relationship to mortality. much has changed. But that boy and thing. The silver is there, I suppose, A gay director born after the events depicted white objectifi cation and abuse of black South written on photography. In 2004, Barthes had begun writing the book the way he looks at his mother are for all the self-refl ection the image in the fi lm, Hermanus was intrigued by the African performer Saartjie Baartman, to it was made into a work of art by soon after Henriette’s death in 1977 pretty much the same.” Soth tells me carried for Barthes, and for us now.” idea of exploring a regimented realm denied divisive eff ect. Idris Khan, whose single mysterious – it had just been published when the older he gets, the more he thinks, Keeper of the Hearth attests to to men of colour in the apartheid era, while Hermanus is prepared for pushback, but photographic image is titled Every Barthes himself died in hospital like Barthes, that “every photograph the continuing resonance of an fi nding common ground in his closeted white doesn’t see South African cinema evolving via Single Page of Roland Barthes’s after being struck by a laundry van The picture is also the mystery In the 40 years since, by virtue of on an old, faded photograph of a has the aura of death”. “The irony image none of us have seen and protagonist’s suff ering under a vicious Afrikaner kid-glove treatment of its own ugly history. Book Camera Lucida. It haunts the in Paris. Although the snapshot at the heart of Camera Lucida. In a its very absence, the Winter Garden girl from another time and thought about my selection is that my mom is that may not even exist , and to patriarchy. “The subject matter did bother me at “The challenge in the South African fi lm writings of the late WG Sebald and, initially made Barthes exclaim: narrative punctuated by images by Photograph has attained an almost immediately of Henriette. still alive,” adds Soth, “Nevertheless, the singular spell of Barthes’s odd, fi rst,” he says from his home outside , landscape right now is that it still seems to in 2009, it inspired Photography “There she is!”, his analysis leads the likes of André Kertész, Richard mythical aura, so much so that some In May 2017, I began rifl ing though when I look at that picture now , mischievous, melancholy take on where he’s self-isolating under coronavirus exist very much within racial boundaries: Degree Zero , an anthology of him to question the complex, Avedon and Alfred Stieglitz, the shot critics have questioned that it ever a box of old photos in search of one what I see is approaching death. And photography and its seemingly lockdown. “It was my mum who actually said to white money making nostalgia pieces for writings on Barthes . bittersweet nature of that epiphany. of his mother as a girl is nowhere existed at all. It has become fi rmly such image, having received an email not just for her!” intrinsic relationship to death. For me, ‘Why make another fi lm about white men in white people that are devoid of black people, The passage above describes Like all family photographs, it is to be seen. “I cannot reproduce the lodged in the collective consciousness from Odette England, an American This sense of time’s inexorable all that, one has to wonder if Camera apartheid South Africa?’ and then you’ve got black fi lm-makers making Barthes’s discovery of a portrait of essentially a tantalising glimpse of Winter Garden Photograph. It exists of photography students and photographer and academic. It passing is something of a constant. Lucida’s importance attests above all “The challenge is to fi nd the centre of it that romantic comedies and genre fi lms about his mother, Henriette, aged fi ve, the irretrievable, a cruel reminder of only for me,” he writes by way of practitioners through the strange, was a request “to submit a single German-born photographer Barbara to the power of words to evoke the resonates with you completely. And for me, that black lives,” he says. “I decided we were going in which she is standing next to “what has ceased to be”; like them it explanation. “For you, it would be melancholy drift of Barthes’s writing. photograph to the Winter Garden Diener submitted a picture of her ineff able in ways that photography became not just about the character’s sexuality, to put the world in the headspace of white her seven -year-old brother “in a evokes a past we often have no lived nothing but an indiff erent picture, I cannot be the only photography Photograph project ... a refl ection on two -year-old self kissing her father simply cannot. but about the shame factor: the fact that under South Africa in the 80s, to show what that glassed-in conservatory, what was memory of, but also a sense of our one of the thousand manifestations buff who, while rooting in a junk shop Barthes’s unpublished snapshot of through what looks, on fi rst glance, Keeper of the Hearth by Odette this regime, boys were sort of shamed into looked like from the inside.”

called a winter garden in those own encroaching mortality. of the ordinary… ” or a fl ea market stall, has happened his mother”. THE ARTISTS COURTESY PHOTOGRAPHS: like prison bars. The snap was in fact England is published by Schilt . EYE ARTIFICIAL MANNERS/CURZON RUTLAND DANIEL PHOTOGRAPHS: becoming a certain kind of man. Because we Moffi e is out on 24 April on Curzon Home Cinema