ABOUT

South Africa is a beautiful country and I have traveled it throughout my life. Over weekends my family would camp in the Western Cape, venturing further afield for school holidays. I have spent long hours looking out of a car window.

Though I have never been to a “first-world” country, I’m assured that the sides of their roads are vastly different from our own. For them, a road is just that, a road—a waypoint between destinations.
But in South Africa, the road is a place in and of itself.

Inspired by Alex and Rebecca Norris Webbs' Poetic Image, I began to imagine a kind of odyssey or national epic playing out across South Africa’s streets. If we treated the road as an observer, what would be familiar to it? How would we describe its character?

It became a habit of mine to notice what happens outside my car, and slowly, I became conscious of a kind of road-side mythology. It was as if the road were a kind of national epic; our mythos being scenes that are so familiar to the South African viewer, that they have become an implicit part of what we expect to see alongside our roads.

I imagined a photographic series, as a kind of homage to South Africa. Each image, a chapter or verse, in an epic narrative.

Runners training for a marathon. Broken down cars. Cattle in traffic. Men urinating. Taxis pulling over ‘illegally’. Children playing football. Burning grassland. Vendors. Beggars. The silhouettes of people on an overpass.

But most important is the commuter. South Africa is a country of walkers and waiters. Men and women walking to a bus stop, waiting for a taxi rank, looking at passing cars for a lift.

Also part of the mythos is the type of car and who drives it. In this country, there is a close association between race, class, and vehicle. Much like the pick-up truck is the symbol of the American South, our vehicles have cultural significance. Boers (Afrikaans farmers) drive hardy Hiluxes, whilst Cape Malays lower the suspension and kit out Golfs and Ballades. There are many of these relations and though they are not ubiquitous, these associations exist in every South African mind.

With this idea of a national mythology, I began to photograph. At first, I simply leaned out of the car with my camera in hand, taking snapshots of people as I passed by. But this felt uncomfortable.

I didn’t like the idea of commuters having no agency over the image. There was a power imbalance between me, someone wealthy enough to own a camera and to drive in a car, versus them, who were waiting for transport, and could do nothing to prevent me from taking a photograph and then disappearing.

I needed people to know I was there, holding a camera, but stopping the car proved challenging. I didn’t want to drive, spot something, slow down, jump out of the car, and run over to someone and snap their photo. This felt equally hostile.

To build a kind of safety between myself and the subjects, I would walk through a location with my camera visible so that viewers were conscious of what I was doing. Very often, I was approached and asked for a photo, which I would take and send to the subject. On instances when I did see something from inside the car, I would pull over and give out Cokes or other beverages as a way of introduction, before bringing out the camera.

This allowed me to get much closer to my subject matter, and for them to behave in a more representative manner.

This series is only in its infancy. A national epic must be formidable, and so far, the majority of my images were taken in my home province. The challenge, as with every project is time and funding, but I’m confident that I’ll be on the road again within a year.