03 Sep 2009
Inevitably there are those cringe moments when you listen back to your taped interview. You hear yourself rudely cutting straight into the elaborate argument of your subject. And with equal dismay you notice that you forgot to ask that obvious follow-up question.
So through my headphones I hear myself talking to photographer Jo Ractliffe in a Parktown North restaurant. I have ordered seafood pasta and she, dressed entirely in black, prefers lamb chops “with big pieces of fat down the side”. We have a bottle of shiraz and we chat for two hours. Outside it’s freezing cold, inside it’s cosy. She talks in a deep voice. I interrupt. She talks more. And I, in my eagerness, change the subject - again and again, giving the conversation a random spin that somehow suits her work.
Example? Ractliffe expounds on her latest project, which involves a series of photographs based around the Angola Border War (1966-1989). She talks about her plans of going into the area with famous ex-combatants such as general Jan Breytenbach of 32 Battalion. And me? I ask her if Beat writer Jack Kerouac is still an influence.
“Ermm,” she says, frowning. “Yes, I think he’s still under my skin.”
That Kerouac query didn’t completely come out of the blue though. It’s just that my mind worked in a delayed fashion. Because earlier she talked about how she started photography, while studying painting at Cape Town’s Ruth Prowse School of Art. And that’s where the Beats come in.
“I bought a secondhand Nikomat for R135,” she begins the tale of her epiphany. “I had a boyfriend whose brother was a doctor and lived in Noordhoek. He wrote poetry, had met (poet and Beat publisher) Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco and introduced me to the Beats. He was this very romantic character. I took all these pictures on his farm, and I knew straight away there was something about my relationship to the word and to the world in a photograph that just made me feel very much at home. I realised that my interest was about seeing, not about the material.”
With hindsight I can say that this quote summed her up for me, and as a result destroyed any sense of structure in our conversation, because there was just too much that got me going. The quote contained the element of chance, the fascination with the written word and cut-up Beat narratives, the romantic idea of solitude, and the wrought relationship with the world, which centers around longing, desire and loss, all pointing at an outsider’s view. Or as she puts it: “A big part of my life has been this longing for redemption.”
Here I do manage a follow up question: Redemption?
“Redemption for the way life is,” she adds and explains that both her parents came out from the UK, which makes her a first generation South African. “For a long time I didn’t have a sense of how I could belong, certainly in childhood. My parents didn’t speak Afrikaans. Where is home? You live in Cape Town, cut off, not connected to any South Africaness at all. For a long time I felt I didn’t have a history, not even a memory that I could frame in a particular way. I had an unhinged non-thing. I was horrified at what an ignorant childhood I had. There had been no political conscientising until I got to university.”
Before the lamb chops arrive she shows me some of her older work: the vicious dogs of Nadir (1987), the N1 road trip to Cape Town (1996), her first Angola adventure (2008) and the photographs taken with her Diana camera, a toy instrument she acquired in 1990 after all her equipment had been stolen. These are hazy, out of focus and blurred, but strangely enticing. The recurring narrative is the attempt to capture something that isn’t there, a sense of loss, be it a dead donkey near Beaufort West or the post-Apocalyptic visions at Boa Vista, Angola - somewhere beyond social documentary and art photography, an anti-classical aesthetic with the overarching theme of solitude. The images are scary and mystifying, yet strangely beautiful.
Her work is an neverending exploration of ‘Elsewhere’, the space between real and fiction, which only she with her awkward sensibility sees, and tirelessly tries to capture. “I work from a space of dissatisfaction with what I’ve done,” she explains after chewing on some lamb.
Although her photographs are now part of important private and public collections, they existed for a long time without being reviewed or receiving official acknowledgement. Often it seemed as if they weren’t meant to be seen. Like when they were bound to make an impact at the 1995 Joburg Biennale, but literally crashed to the floor. Or when her gallery, Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary, recently closed down, just as she was preparing for her Border War adventure.
As an amateur boxer, she takes it all in her stride. “I remember having a conversation with artist Alan Alborough. Everybody wanted him. And he didn’t want to exhibit. He said he wasn’t ready. That was very profound for me. I thought: make the work and the rest will take care of itself. And that’s what I did for years: just make the work, have exhibitions in the middle of the Karoo. I did what wanted to do.”
For the next months she’ll work with that uncanny landscape north of our border, and she’ll come up with more broken tales told through blurry black and white images - part of her lonely artistic mission, for which, I suggest, she must have sacrificed quite a bit. She shakes her head. “I wasn’t aware that I had any other choice. I don’t know that I made sacrifices. I’m not interested in things like ‘getting ahead’. I don’t pitch myself. I’m competing with my own rather fucked up little self. It doesn’t interest me to be ‘famous’, but it does interest me to be seen in a particular way. I’m not interested in my work if it’s just fashionable or trendy or idiosyncratic. I’m interested in that it has something solid behind it, interested in that it’s an individualistic way of thinking and seeing the world. That is important.”
I hear my voice through the headphones. Instead of digging deeper into her Border fascination, I ask her about her collaboration with composer Philip Miller. I cringe.
CV
1961 Born in Cape Town
1978 Studies at Ruth Prowse School of Art, Cape Town
1988 Master of Fine Art: University of Cape Town
1989 Solo exhibition Nadir, Metropolitan Life Gallery, Cape Town
1991 Lecturer in print making and photography at Wits University
1995 Solo exhibition reShooting Diana, Market Gallery, Johannesburg
2000 Founder member, curator of the Joubert Park Project
2002 Solo exhibition Snow White, Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Vallais, Switzerland
2004 Solo exhibition Selected Works 1982 – 1999, Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, Johannesburg
2005 Solo exhibition Selected Colour Works 1999 – 2005, Warren Siebrits
2008 Solo exhibition Terreno Ocupado, Warren Siebrits
Heroes/influences
Frankie Laine - Hell Bent for Leather. “This was my very first record ever - a collection of cowboy songs, given to me by my grandfather when I was 9 and the start of my romance with all things lonesome and travelling.”
Jack London. “I must have read White Fang and Call of the Wild a hundred times as a child; I loved the idea of wild men and dogs in the wilderness.”
Johnny Cash. “We had one of those big reel-to-reel tape players when I was young and Lay Lady Lay was on it. It’s that dark voice and the idea of him - the flawed man in search of redemption. He reminds me of the kind of men I knew in childhood, at my dad’s brickworks…”
Jack Kerouac. “All because of the line, ‘the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time…’ I was still a teenager and I remember identifying so closely with that shambling desire of his – always on the edges of things…”
Russell Hoban. “His book, Riddley Walker, is in my top ten books of all time and alongside Kapuscinski’s, Another day of Life, was key for the Nadir images; I took all those mad bad dogs from his ‘Bernt Arse’ pack and put them in my images.”
Robert Frank. “The Americans gave me a sense that what I wanted from photography was possible – a way of seeing and a sensibility, as well as the kinds of things I was interested in making pictures about. That photography could be like writing…”
Manuel Alvarez Bravo. “Someone said if Cartier-Bresson epitomises the ‘decisive moment’, Manuel Alvarez Bravo is the ‘eternal moment’. I love how he heightens and stills the world at the same time. And his photograph of a dead striking mineworker has to be one of the most compelling I’ve ever seen. When I first saw it, I fell in love with that dead man.”