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George Hallett
South Africans are not only politically very aware because of this long
struggle against Apartheid, they are conscious of photographers, because
photographers from all over the world came there during the Apartheid
years, to photograph what is now known as The Struggle, and so people
are conscious. I remember a woman speaking to me one day and saying, 'I
prefer you taking pictures of me because those other guys – and they
call themselves newspaper photographers – they stand me not in front
of my part of the house, they put me in front of those shanties and I
ask them why they say, "well it looks real”'. Now these are
the kind of conversations we have with people where I act as a kind of
a praise singer because I’m doing a portrait of them. I’m not
going to put them in front of corrugated iron to make my picture look
better. When they have choices they prefer the more romantic version or
picture of themselves.
Vanley Burke
And also the images – a bit like the way images were used here by
immigrants from the Caribbean. And I always maintain that there is a great
similarity between immigrants from the Caribbean to England and immigrants
as then in Apartheid, from the townships, the homelands to the cities,
Johannesburg and so on. It’s a migratory process which is normally
an economical process. And what would happen is people would take their
photographs here and they would dress up for the photographs, and these
photographs were then sent back to the Caribbean and they were representative
of their status, that they've been. Quite often the photographs were a
lie. I mean, for example, some of the pictures in some of the studios
had someone posing by a table with a telephone, but you’d see the
cord of the telephone and it wasn’t plugged in anywhere, you know?
There are all sorts of things like that, but nonetheless they will choose.
And a good example again – I was in Soweto photographing
with this family at a bar – beautiful name – ‘Tigers Don’t
Cry’ was the name of this bar – and I’d spent all day there.
And there’s this woman who was doing housework and doing her thing,
but come the evening you’d be changing your clothes and she had a
baby strapped on her back and she was ready for a photograph at this point
and she says ‘come and take a photograph of me’. And I did,
and she was in the kitchen and she opened the fridge and she wanted to
pose by the fridge, with the contents of the fridge, and it’s a way
of showing that she’s made it, she’s made something with her
life: she now has a fridge, you know, and there’s the contents. The
fridge is full and she’s not just sitting in front of a shack, and
she’s not untidy.
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