Who am I - Leon Botha

The history of South African documentary photography is littered with examples of what many have seen as the exploitation of an ‘Other’ by the person behind the lens; the photographing of poor, indigent or otherwise ‘different’ subjects by an all-powerful gaze who imposes meaning through the action of the shutter click and thus is complicit in the further differencing and disempowering of those who are located within the picture frame. In a radical and fresh new body of work two artists have collaboratively turned this negative ‘tradition’ on its head and produced a fresh and exciting body of work that explores the questions of mortality, destiny and humanity. The result is a powerful photo series, Who Am I? - Transgressions. These two artists dare us to transgress and disrupt the order and comfort of assumed positions in life, exploring the idea of what it means to be a human being.

The two artists are Gordon Clark, a veteran of Hollywood now living and working in South Africa, with much photographic experience under his belt and painter Leon Botha, one of the longest survivors of the cruel genetic condition Progeria, which rapidly accelerates aging of the body. Working together on a nine month journey of self-discovery and the discovery of each other, Clark as photographer and Botha as subject and metaphor, have produced a 38 image photographic collection that centres on aging: how we view it, the manner in which we fear it, and ultimately how we have to look at it, confront it and deal with it. ‘This is a reminder’, says Clark, ‘that we all have the Progeria gene, it’s just a question of when and how rapidly it gets you.’

The key theme which runs through Who Am I? - Transgressions is mortality and immortality and how we live our lives within the time we have This Leon argues, is in any event transient for all of us. With a body that belies his 24 years (the process of aging is seven times faster with Progeria) but a mind well beyond his actual age and undaunted the spectre of his demise, Leon is adamant that he doesn’t fear death. ‘I fear what is going to happen in between then and now,’ he philosophically observes.

Therein lies the heart of the work, meant to challenge how we see ourselves and others. Beyond the obvious, the images take us to a poetic space where we examine our perceptions of correctness, the ordered, and the ‘Other’, the acceptable, the comforting, the beautiful.

The two artists describe their partnering as an adventure, as the coming together of two strangers, two very different people, beyond the parody of flesh, who discover a commonality in the meeting of spirit. How they see the contemporary world, and how they want to portray it, bonded them in a partnership where according to Clark, their ideas and inspiration constantly fluctuated and evolved.

Gordon Clark: ‘Leon wanted to push the boundaries exploring all aspects of an accelerated life and death. I needed to transgress my views on how I saw life itself. I realized that my twenty-four years of living in Hollywood, being exposed to and part of the machine considered beautiful, needed to be turned upside down. Leon was the perfect conduit, the link I needed to make that dramatic leap.

The experience was different because I was not just dealing with someone who had a condition I wanted to photograph, but another artist, a creative person in his own right. This brought about a synergy that raised the working process to levels much higher than either of us could ever have encountered individually. Leon’s ability to communicate made me understand the reality of his life and journey on a deep basis which goes beyond the physical, and pushed me to explore alternatives to the ideas I had had in my mind. We found that spontaneous adjustments had to be made throughout the process, with imagery evolving rather than working to a clearly defined plan.’

Together they say, they were able to examine for themselves and for us as the viewer of their collaboration, not just Leon’s inevitable death and what it means to be different, but the bigger question: the condition of mankind and the fact that death looms for all of us, unseen and waiting in the wings.

Leon Botha: ‘People interpret a lot of what I do as quite dark. A lot of the time it is not my intention to specifically shock, it’s just the nature of me expressing the fibre of reality. I think a lot of people forget that common human experiences like pain, heartache and suffering do not pass you by because you have a condition, and are labelled in a different box. Rather, it becomes part of the fibre of what you are working with. To be honest, I cherish that because it’s like baring scars.’

Time and space are transcended by their photography because the themes captured and questioned are universal and timeless. They have created a unique for of artistic production that goes far beyond the confines of documentary work by jointly deciding on theme and subject and literally journeying together to strange, sometimes haunted locations to shoot their enigmatic and challenging pictures. Drawing on legends, popular culture, arcane and hidden traditions as well as creating work that confronts stereotypes of popular culture as much as they draw upon them for inspiration, they have constructed a major sequence and produced art that shall outlive them both as well as those who view it today.

The fact that people who have seen Leon inevitably make judgements – usually incorrect – about him is one of the key themes of Who Am I? – Transgressions. That fact that we judge people on visual appearances and then, based on this, we make judgments about who they are, is made implicit in the artwork. That this leads to prejudices about what is ugly or beautiful, old or young, good or bad, and that these prejudices upon which we build our value systems, infiltrate all aspects of our lives, is challenged and confused in this body of work and is what viewers are meant to take away from the act of quickly glancing at the photographs.

Despite this one of the most appealing aspects of the series is in the beauty of the photographs, and how some of the natural scenic views are combined with images that some viewers may perceive as ugly or unacceptable. The images are sensitively crafted, unveiling both pathos and courage. Stylized settings are consistently juxtaposed between shades of light and dark, the inner and outer worlds. But perhaps the most impressive part of the work is how in a subtle balance, the seemingly grotesque and the normatively aesthetic are held together in a single lexicon, forcing a reassessment of such categories as held by the public.

With the combination of flair and technique that the pair display, the divide between shock and empathy is deliberately blurred by these artists by means of using settings and elements explicitly chosen for this reason.

For instance, by using props, backgrounds and situations that are familiar and easy to relate to the artists invite the viewer in, making them feel grounded. Nevertheless there works display a keen sense of the uncanny and uncomfortable. Having a dog in a suburban area perhaps gives the viewer a sense of security and familiarity but a gnashing and aggressive wolf in the same setting as seen in ‘Whistling At The Wolf’ creates a very difference sensibility. Botha is seen to be whistling as if he is bonding with a friendly dog in his own neighbourhood, almost oblivious to the clear danger posed by this wild and untamed animal. In essence he is actually egging on danger. ‘The wolf is what I am really fighting every day in my inner self.’

Part of Clark’s intention was to make the work ambiguous, ‘we had a strong message, but in the end it’s the viewer who must interpret.’

In ‘Gates of Infinity’ Leon reaches for Eden’s apple from a old deformed tree, but in the right frame of the picture are conventional homes, such as those that the viewer may hail from, consciously positioned to blur the notion of outer and inner, ourselves and the other.

Abnormality and normality are meshed, side by side. ‘Anyway, what is normal, and what is not?’ the photographs seem to ask? Normality becomes a grey area in the works, as each in their own way reveal the ironies of living with abnormality and some of the consequent distortions Leon faces in his life are projected back upon us, demanding us to address how others see our normalcy and the purported norms that society constructs.

In one of the photographs, ‘Adam and Eve’, Leon and a beautiful woman are lying in a forest with the woman’s head in his lap and his hands on her hair. To some this may be unexpected, even startling or disturbing. ‘But why’, asks Leon ‘should I not lie with a beautiful girl?’

Getting the viewer to think beyond the surface view of Leon and his condition, to question their own conditions and prejudices, meant finding symbols in the work that were contrasting and often paradoxical. The result is that images form and co-join into hard poetry, perhaps hard to digest but even harder to ignore. ‘The object was to show up both the fragility and strength, decay and determination, light and dark in Leon, of which we are all part, and of which, we are all made,’ says Clark.

Tolerance was another theme explored through metaphor. Not as much the tolerance of Leon as much as the tolerance that Botha has to summon up each day of his life. As he notes: ‘We addressed ideas such as tolerance, which speaks to other people’s tolerance of me when I am out in public, and by the same token the tolerance I have towards enduring that. That’s why I insisted on placing a hammer in one shot because we tend to think of the limit to our tolerance, not the extent of it.’

In the work ‘Tolerance’ Leon, hammer in hand, is standing like a statue for all the world to see and stare, dressed in dinosaur gear and watching a child shouting at a toy. Botha is by no means surreal; he exists and has authentic essence. But such is the artistry in the photos and the composition of the still image that, through the marrying together of everyday settings with often exaggerated theatrical costume, his reality, and those of the photographs, take on a surreal magical quality.

Dressed up and placed in dramatic costume settings, Botha is portrayed as triumphant, coping and celebrating his life. Rich archetypal and mythological symbols like Adam flirting with Eve, Christian and Pagan, alchemical and scientific, conflate, rub against each and create new and unexpected meanings.

The sitter-as-artist is always the central point in this body of photography, and is often linked to some landscape or wasteland. Through this carefully crafted counterpoints, contrasts and contradictions – all laden with intention and meaning – are revealed. In ‘Away From The World’, Leon’s crouching, insignificant and half hidden body is in a highway bunker site, whilst a very large truck is passing him by. Similarly as the ‘Bleeding Knight’ he climbs up steep steps, but with his blood-red robes flowing from him. Frail but determined, he is on a high-powered steamroller on a building site in ‘Making Space for New People’, reflecting the paradigm of life and death.

Perhaps one of the most visually disturbing images is ‘See No Evil’. Here Botha has a large knife in hand and is cutting through a red-ripe melon, whilst the three monkeys (hear, see, and speak no evil) and a fluffy tiger toy look casually on.

Though the work speaks to the issues related to spirit, in another paradox, the photographs concentrate on Leon’s body, magnifying the details with conscientious and courageous intent so ‘the viewer has difficulty turning away’.

Clark photographed everything on 4x5 (or 6x7) format with considerable depth of field so as to capture the finest points of Leon’s appearance, without hiding or softening the impact of who he is and how he looks. Clark had previously been shooting in a very shallow depth of field only focusing on distant elements that he felt were important. In the case of Who Am I? – Transgressions he wanted Leon as well as the background to be equally sharp. ‘I want to show reality, not hide it,’ says Clark ‘and Leon is the perfect metaphor for doing this.’

Some bold and powerful portraits are devoted to depicting Leon and his condition, fictively using theatrical make-up to reveal high definition fibre, muscle, blood, bones, skin and veins. Perhaps the artists are forcing us to consider what we actually see when we look at the surface of a person’s body and what we impose on that vision through our own assumptions and preconceptions.

Engaging people to look at the artwork and become involved in the drama and deeper underlying meaning was a critical issue, admits Clark. Thus the images were blown up in order to make them seem larger than life. ‘This way the viewer has to engage rather than ignore. You can’t look away, it’s in your face’, says Clark. In this act Botha and Clark have utilized one of the commonplaces of contemporary art photography in a fresh and original way that makes sense within their artistic intentions rather than slavishly following a current-day fashion.

Who Am I? – Transgressions is currently on show at the João Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town. As one of South Africa’s premier gallerists he has worked with many of South Africa’s major artists including William Kentridge, Bridget Baker, Dan Halter and Sam Nhlengethwa. Ferreira selected the series for his gallery because he believes that aside from the fact that the photography is technically of an extremely high quality what makes the work interesting is that ‘it is not only a documentary but also a narrative. The idea in documentary photography of showing up societies preconceptions and the damage this does, in not new. But instead of just recording Leon’s daily existence this artwork tells a story and encourages questions. Each piece is constructed so that we ask: Why is he there? What is he doing? What is that doing in the image? This holds and engages the mind not just the eye.’

Transcending social and other boundaries through their collaboration, Gordon Clark and Leon Botha use photography as a contemporary and cutting edge art form. Sensational though unsettling, this portfolio opens up space for discussion and introspection. It is much more than a graphic summation of our attitude to age and surface appearance. It is a statement against all forms of intolerance emanating from a country that has long exposure to multifarious forms of prejudice. In this it is a radical inversion of many of the myths and presuppositions we hold dear and a call to arms to challenge those that still surround us.

Clark and Botha have presented us with a new way of looking at subjectivity and in so doing have turned the tables on a long history of representation that has dogged both South Africa and documentary more broadly. Ultimately their process turns us into self-reflective subject and demands answers from us that transgress our boundaries and comfort zones, forcing from us a response to their question Who Am I?

END - GORDON CLARK

Tributes:

Professor Sandra Van der Merwe, Cape Town, Jan. 2010
Andrew Lamprecht, Lecturer in theory and discourse of art, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Jan. 2010

Three Quotes from; The Fibre of Reality by Lauren Clifford Holmes, in Mail and Guardian, Jan 15, 2010
Content from Coming Of Age by Lin Sampson, In Lifestyle, Sunday Times October 18, 2009