Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views

The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
15 July – 24 October

By Murtaza Vali

South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa first garnered international attention in the late 1990s for his Interiors (1995–2005) series, large-format colour portraits of migrant workers shot in their modest homes in the many informal settlements that surround South African cities. Inner Views, Mthethwa’s first New York museum solo, draws selectively from this and two other series that specifically picture domestic spaces.

Produced in collaboration with the sitters, whose homes serve as ad hoc studios (and to whom Mthethwa dutifully gives a finished print), the Interiors pictures offset the detached objectivity of social documentary with the intimate exchange of portraiture. Surrounded by their meagre possessions, the workers take up formal poses, and their cramped, makeshift dwellings, cobbled together from panels of cardboard and corrugated tin, are often a riot of colour and pattern. The paper surplus of global capital – gilded advertisements and packaging for liquor, technicolour inserts filled with supermarket specials, glamorous fashion glossies – is repurposed as wallpaper, jostling against equally busy patterned bedspreads and linoleum floors, all masterfully captured in the vivid colour photographs.

However, Mthethwa’s use of colour photography is politically, not aesthetically, motivated. Colour, which demonstrates the sitters’ vitality, resilience and resourcefulness in the face of poverty and oppression, restores, in Mthethwa’s words, their ‘dignity’ as individuals. As such, Mthethwa’s images serve as an antidote to the sensationalist rhetoric associated with black-and-white reportage of township life under and after apartheid.

In one image, a jacketed young man leans self-assuredly against a blue kitchen cabinet, at the centre of a space otherwise filled with echoes of red. The latter colour draws and holds our attention, indicating similarly coloured details we may have otherwise missed: a small kitchen cart, a piece of cloth covering a plastic basin, a cloth bag dangling from a hook, an empty Coke bottle perched on a shelf above. Despite the overall formal harmony, Mthethwa manages to succinctly convey the stark reality of township life by including large portions of floor, ceiling and wall, literally boxing his subject in; the image’s low hang in the exhibition – the lower left of a quartet – exaggerates this sense of enclosure.

Such sitters are notably absent from the other two series. In Empty Beds (2002), the most private of spaces begins to resemble an altar of sorts, the missing figure hinting at the loneliness and the separation from family and community endured by these workers. In a different vein, Common Ground (2008) links marginalised communities in South Africa and post-Katrina New Orleans through photographs of water-damaged homes from both sites that carefully avoid all markers of cultural or geographic specificity. A wall made up of differently coloured panels resembles a modernist abstraction in one, while another shows an open medicine cabinet embedded in a grotty, stained bathroom wall. Though they evince Mthethwa’s considerable photographic skills, these series lack the active tension that the portraits maintain between recognisable genres of photography, settling too easily into categories such as fine art or social documentary..

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