While concerns like these are evident in the works of a number of the photographs included in the two shows, significantly, hardly any of these women artists moved beyond the immediate reality of their own (white) middle class experience. Indeed, although Dorothee Kreutzfeldt seeks to engage the often very harsh but always evocatively poignant realities of contemporary life in the greater Johannesburg area, and Sue Williamson finds that it is only possible for a woman to enter the male world of Cairo nightlife if she is a complete outsider, by and large the photographs contained in these two exhibitions reflect preoccupations that are far removed from the lived realities of the majority of South African women today.
In pointing to this fact, my intention is certainly not to devalue the aims of the photographers who participated in the two exhibitions, or to suggest that they should accept a greater political responsibility, or provide a politically more 'correct' take on the history of representation in South Africa. Rather, it is to highlight both the specificity of their concerns and the remarkable quality of nostalgia that seems to characterise the projects of many of the participants. It is an extraordinary fact that several of these artists provide glimpses into the now forgotten worlds once occupied by their parents and grandparents.
Although never overt, the widespread interest in issues of gender and sexuality in both exhibitions high-lights the increasingly problematic relationship between physical appearance and the desirability in (Western) society. This anxious relationship is reflected, most obviously, but by no means only, in Claire Breukel's photomontages of her mother and grandmother, as well as in the photographs of Tracy Lindner Gander. The latter photographer (together with Arnold Erasmus) presents a document of "the pregnant body during the last six weeks of pregnancy". According to Lindner Gander, this changing (pregnant) body "signifies shifts of identity from individual to that of mother and parent". Breukel meanwhile reconfigures images of "once youthful figures" in a nostalgic search for a feminine identity that seeks to transcend prescriptive social norms but, sadly, seems incapable of escaping them. Similar issues are raised by Jillian Lochner's manipulated images of a Barbie doll enacting scenes reminiscent of those performed by naked women in striptease clubs. But in this case the stark setting and harsh lighting suggest an inescapably depressing sense of loss and alienation.
Although apparently essential, even eternal, these images of women struggling to come to terms with their own (mediated) sexuality, is bellied by the voluptuous cheesecake soft-porn colour photographs that Jean Brundrit's grandfather collected on a trip to Europe in the 1950s. These form part of the Sweet Nothings exhibition. It is an entirely apt tribute to the later exhibition that one of these coyly available images of feminine sexuality - reminiscent of photographs documenting 1950s icons like Marilyn Monroe - was chosen for the cover of the modest catalogue produced to accompany that show. For, like the work of several other photographers included in both exhibitions, this found image draws attention to the fact that ideals of feminine beauty (and appropriate behaviour) are subject to constant renegotiation and redefinition.
The interest in found objects, including found photographs, evident in the work of a number of the photographers from the two shows, provides what in some ways could be seen as a key to understanding the complex political role photography has come to play in contemporary society. Always alert to the medium's voyeuristic potential, some of the photographers actively avoid the human subject; alternatively, they present people seen through the lens of other photographers or, as in the case of Katherine Bull's work, through the grainy, smudged images produced on a mobile phone in the hazy artificial light cast by street and other lamps at night.
Here, and elsewhere in these two exhibitions, the photographer's self-conscious attention to how images can be, and are mediated encourages the viewer to take seriously even those images that seem otherwise to be quite light-hearted in intention.
