In the passing months since this time, I’ve often thought about this
moment,
about the stillness and silence of the room, and of the muted laughter outside
in the sun beyond the slightly open door of the morgue. Of course, these
images are
indeed, as André Bazin cites, “…the death masks of a time
that has gone forever…”;
yet the feelings that I experienced as I wandered for twomonths through the
city of Cape Town still remain and perhaps will never leave me.
Whilst I first visited Cape Town in 2005, the images in this exhibition
were
produced during an extended stay in the city between 2006 and the start of
2007.
Beyond the underlining premise of White woman, Observatory, Cape Town, 2006
observing the city and the varied spaces within, I was interested too in
attempting
to examine the psychology of those who lived with the fraught realities of
the city
by constructing images that imbued an air of introspection and anxiety.
What is clear is that by 2010, 73% of South Africans will be city dwellers.
In
this sense, for the first time the city will be the meeting place for the
majority of
its citizens and therefore the theatre where the nation’s anxieties
will be enacted and lived. Through my images I do not pretend to give answers,
but instead I hope to open up a window of discussion that attempts to examine
the ways in which people are inevitably and yet unconsciously marked by the
past, by the fragmented and transitory spaces of the present and finally
by the irreconcilable realities of the future.
Andrew Jackson
