This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

3rd November 2007

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Have the fashion industry and the cult of celebrity made our perceptions of beauty irredeemably superficial? Or are the airbrushed images that confront us in the print media and on TV merely reformulations of long-established archetypes? Natasha Norman poses these questions in The Look of Love, which is currently on display at the Bell-Roberts Gallery in Cape Town.

The exhibition consists of works in two distinct styles. On the one hand, there are cheeky photographic recreations of famous Renaissance paintings. Norman has arranged models in poses that imitate well-known pictures of masculine and feminine beauty, but with a few significant differences. In ‘Post-production’ (Michaelangelo’s depiction of the creation from the Sistine Chapel ceiling), God wears a movie director’s baseball cap, the angel at his side is an assistant with a clipboard and Adam, finger outstretched, has an expression that suggests he is not altogether happy with his Creator. In ‘Femme Nomenclature’ (Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’), the goddess of love is pushed away from the centre by her cupids, two of whom – with hard-hats, tool belts, roses and feathered wings – suggest an ironic homoeroticism. It always seems to be men, Norman suggests, who decide what is beautiful; even, perhaps especially, gay men.

On the other hand, there are digital collages comprising “archive images”: contemporary icons of beauty as purveyed by fashionistas, gleaned by Norman from the pages of women’s magazines. They are accompanied by trite phrases such as “I loved you before I met you”, “I hunger for your touch” or “It feels like love”. These clichés are echoed in the titles of the works, set against the more substantial but arcane mythology of the Tarot (each piece is based on a character from a particular card – the Emperor, the Empress, the Magician, the Female Pope).

The effect achieved by these collages is more than simple pastiche. Norman shows us how ancient, Medieval and early modern ideals of beauty have become commodified and somehow mundane in consumerist postmodernity. In doing so, however, she also reappropriates them; her work, infused with rich colour and a pleasing symmetry, transforms the commercial photograph into the photographic art installation – even though, she insists, “I’m not really a photographer!”

The question of what constitutes ‘photography’ is also raised by Monique Pelser’s Roles, which preceded Norman’s exhibition at the Bell-Roberts. In this innovative series, the photographer stands in front of the lens while the ‘subject’ takes the photograph: Pelser appears on behalf of her subjects, dressed in their clothes, copying their hairstyles and framed by their work environments.

Her primary aim was to make viewers of the photos aware of the worlds that run in parallel to their own: “the places and the people and the jobs that we don’t think about in our day-to-day lives, in our own small boxes.” The exhibition invokes the work of German photographer August Sander, who undermined the Third Reich’s doctrine of Aryan purity by photographing subjects from across the social spectrum. Pelser deliberately sought out people who perform “obscure” jobs; she wanted to show those who make hidden contributions to society.

Thus, while the occupations portrayed – and the titles of each work – include well-known roles like ‘farmer’, ‘librarian’ and ‘mechanic’, there are also depictions of a ‘fish filliter’, a ‘newspaper hopper feeder’ and a ‘highstar forklift driver’. There are jobs that most people would want to avoid (‘undertaker’, ‘butcher’, ‘refuse collector’, ‘sewerage works assistant’); careers that are specific to South Africa (‘carguard’, ‘petrol attendant’); occupations that seem terribly dull (‘shelf packer’, ‘video shop assistant’, ‘hair washer’) and others that must be fairly exciting (‘editor/producer’, ‘emergency care practitioner’). Some of the titles imply a critique of euphemistic job descriptions: a cashier is an ‘administrative clerk’, a supply teacher is a ‘relief custodian’.

Although Pelser composed, developed and printed each photograph, in many ways the chief skill on display is impersonation. She notes that she has no acting background, and that when she began the project, she didn’t anticipate the mimicry it would entail. For the most part, she found herself unconsciously patterning her posture and gestures on the subjects when she was taking their photograph; then, when she changed positions with them, it was natural to imitate what she had seen, and many subjects actually encouraged her to act more like them. The end result, according to Pelser, is that (because she could never fully represent her ‘subjects’, but was equally not herself when ‘playing’ them) “the photographs create characters who don’t exist”.

Few of these characters are smiling. Most have stern facial expressions that are open to interpretation: they could indicate pride and diligence, or boredom and dissatisfaction. Pelser says she had her subjects take up to eight photos of her, and selected the one which best matched her photos of them; “the frowns were usually more the result of self-consciousness or discomfort in front of the lens” than a lack of enthusiasm for their jobs.

The cumulative effect of more than 40 photos containing one ‘subject’ (who happens to be white and female) taking on various occupational roles – most of which are heavily inscribed with race, class and gender associations – is simultaneously to personalise, by reminding us of the individuals who perform certain jobs, and to universalise, by taking away the stigma of those jobs as “men’s work” or “woman’s work”, “white people’s work” or “black people’s work”.

A third young Cape-based artist, Jules Morgan, is also exhibiting her work for the first time this year. Morgan’s approach to the photographic subject is less deliberate and, one might even say, more intuitive. Her Africa: People and Paraphernalia, a selection of images from a trans-African trip that she completed with her husband in 2006, has returned to the Exposure gallery in Salt River after a successful launch a few months ago. These are not your typical coffee-table photographs (Morgan avoided wildlife, taking “photos of anything except animals”). Titles specify place-names; there is nothing generic about this Africa.

Although she is more interested in the composition and aesthetics of a shot than in the concept behind it, Morgan admits that she did have specific projects in mind during the journey. One of these was to portray the unexpected ways in which American supplies are utilised. ‘Uses of Foreign Aid, Ethiopia’ shows plants growing out of USA-labelled food tins, hinting at Morgan’s ambivalence regarding handouts from foreign governments and NGOs. A collection of “African scraps” was inspired by the ways in which those who live in conditions of poverty in the developing world are more resourceful than their counterparts in the West: she admires African countries for being “more individual, more colourful, less pristine than, for instance, the UK, the States or Europe”.

Why more individual? Morgan cites another of her projects – bicycles. “Bikes are the mode of transport in Africa, and they’re decorated  by their owners in order to define themselves; they have number plates, bumper stickers, even pious slogans in the more devout countries, and are often labelled ‘Toyota’.” This is another element that fascinates her – the way in which brands are appropriated and subverted (in ‘Advertising, Mozambique’, another hi-tech Japanese brand, Hitachi, is scrawled onto a wall and the back of a stop sign).

It is Morgan’s portrait photography that impresses most. Some are close-ups of faces – a child wrestling with chewing gum, a wrinkled old man smoking – while in others the figures are offset or even overpowered by the colours, shadows and gritty textures of high walls. The crumbling buildings in Morgan’s photographs hint at ‘old world’ African cityscapes that, in turn, represent an ancient history of habitation. Many people perceive Africa as either prehistoric and primal (in terms of fossil record and landscape) or ‘new’ and undeveloped (lacking the marks of long-term civilization). Morgan’s photographs of Africa dispute this dichotomy.