Prague - "Adventure without risk is Disneyland," says a piece of graffiti on a photograph taken by Nontsikelelo Veleko, which accurately summarizes the situation in South Africa ten years after the end of apartheid.
It also defines the attitude toward photography which is presented by the Market Photo Workshop from Johannesburg.
Market Photo Workshop was founded during the times of apartheid, in 1989, by David Goldblatt, the guru of South African documentary photography.
Graduates of this ground-breaking project are displaying their works at Prague's Galerie Langhans under the title "I am not afraid".
Visibility and non-visibility
Photography as a discipline is about visibility and non-visibility of things and events that surround us.
It's not as much about the way one sees things, but the showing itself, the revealing of that which would otherwise remain hidden.
This can be applied to different types of esthetics, as well as to marginalization and "non-visibility" of certain groups of people.
For a long time, Euro-American artists viewed photography as their own display case, and only in the past years they started to value other views on the matter, namely Asian or African.
Camera outward
The "I am not afraid" project represents the newest and freshest display of the fight and subjugation of the a yet unmastered medium.
The project spreads widely, from complete beginners - 15 women who held a camera in their hands for the first time as part of a Ikageng Women's Outreach project which aimed to document their lives - through a series called David by an established photojournalist Jodi Bieber.
Bieber focuses on the fates of loafers from a problem-ridden suburb Fitas. And then, there are street fashion shots in the style of the British magazine i-D by the already mentioned Nontsikelelo Veleko.
All the works in the show are connected by the desire to turn the camera outward and look at the world and reality.
Camera as a navigation tool
When Zanele Muholi in "Faces & Phases" series shows portraits of lesbians or Sabelo Mlangeni with the "Unseen Women" series exposes the work of night street cleaners in Johannesburg, they both have the same purpose at the core - to bring to the surface something which was previously invisible, or even unthinkable. It didn't exist, because it wasn't shown.
This is true for the persisting racial separation, inferior status of women, migration for business, existence of HIV and alternative sexual orientation.
The founder of Market Photo Workshop, David Goldblatt, said two years ago at the Vienna retrospective "Black, Brown, White", dedicated to South African photography, that the camera for him is not a machine gun, but a navigation tool in the labyrinth of politics and racism.
They are not afraid
"I am not afraid", which was instigated and put together by the editors of Camera Austria magazine for the occasion of the 100th issue, to a certain extent continues with the idea of "Black, Brown, White" and Goldblatt's motto.
The difference is that instead of established greats from the militant circle of photographers surrounding the South African magazine Drum, this exhibit shows new authors who are just starting to look for a way to master the visual and use it for their own purposes.
This learning process is being taken up by individuals as well as on the level of general acceptance of photographic language in the country, where 40 percent of the population are otherwise illiterate.
This spawns quite an attractive and, within the Euro-American context, unique phenomenon. The photographs shown in "I am not afraid" are ideologically going back to their foundation, while utilizing quite modern technical means.
They return to a time when the purpose of photography was not to boast media references or use sophisticated conceptual constructs, but the primitive desire to capture the world outside, to show it and maybe even to make a change.
I am not afraid: The Market Photo Workshop Johannesburg. Langhans Galerie, Prague. The exhibit is on June 11-August 17.
