Reclaiming Makhanda’s streets
Photographer captures images of town’s no-go zones
For the better part of the past decade, Greg Wilmot has been walking the streets of Makhanda, camera in hand.
The result is a series of black and white photographs offering a view of the little city that is simultaneously nostalgic and unsettling. If you know Makhanda, you’ll recognise the familiar “sentinel” landmarks the cathedral, Makana’s Kop, the city hall.
However, they’re neither postcard views, nor even “shabby chic”.
Over June and July this year, Wilmot exhibited alongside 10 other artists in the Cornish Visual Arts Centre at St Andrew’s College during the National Arts Festival.
Wilmot’s life work is about people and spaces: he’s a sought-after and experienced counselling psychologist and the drive behind his 35mm photography is to represent the “in between” spaces that people occupy and transition through.
“These in between spaces, between where people work and where they live
I’m interested in those spaces how they blend with the ‘main’ spaces and how do people move around those spaces.”
His wanderings are partly driven by curiosity, but also, they are a search for an antidote to being a long-term resident: “I’m a walker, I love photography and I love this place but you also can’t not see what the challenges are,” Wilmot said.
Looking deeper into the images, the gritty texture, stark contrasting tones, and subject matter give hint of the darker, self-evident traces of history,
change, and challenges faced by the city and its residents.
“By going into those spaces and places you can’t un-see certain things.
“There are things people don’t want to see. It’s easy to get nostalgic until you scratch the surface.
“Early mornings, late afternoons, weekends, public holidays, going into less familiar places and spaces.
“Without people being there, something else comes out which is almost a serendipitous outcome,” he said. “I think you see the space
differently without the people in them.
“Like the zombie movie (Shaun of the Dead) when the guy walks through the middle of London and you see it very differently.”
In only a handful of the photographs are there people present, and in the few where there are, they are mostly incidental passersby. Partly that’s because of the times that Wilmot walks. Partly, also, because he’s always been fascinated with no-go zones.
For children growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s in then Grahamstown,
apartheid geography and social engineering installed psychological boundaries that may take lifetimes to overcome.
Wilmot grew up in Oatlands Road, at the top end of Fitzroy Street, an affluent suburb close to the CBD.
Like Beaufort Street and High Street, it has one leg in middle class suburbia and the other in what apartheid social engineering designated as buffer zones between “white” and “non-white” areas.
“The top of Fitzroy was always a kind of end-point, a barrier,” Wilmot said. “These photographs are a way of being engaged in the town, but also a way of getting past my own myopia. Because you can easily switch off.”
Wilmot added that he hoped his photographs could peel back the layers of seen but unacknowledged changes and challenges in a small town struggling with the long-lasting impact of apartheid urban geography.
In a manifesto for change, Wilmot writes darkly about the experience of walking through one of these inbetween spaces only to discover the tender scene of a mother cow and her calf lying side-by-side against the cold June morning in a vacant and derelict lot behind the Makana Municipality City Hall; a stark juxtaposition between seen and unseen, warmth and poverty, struggle and survival.
There are no immediate plans for an exhibition in 2023 but Wilmot is optimistic that he will exhibit a new series of images at the 2024 National Arts Festival.
“I better appreciate the long timeline of preparation required to shoot, develop, print, and hang an exhibition. It was a crazy rush to pull it together in the end, but I am genuinely pleased with the positive response from the public and I will definitely be doing it again next year.
“The best compliment I received from the exhibition were several people commenting that these photos will be viewed in the next 50-100 years and they will stand as an account of what the city looked like between 2017 and 2023. As a historian at heart, I couldn’t think of a greater honour than to document something that may be viewed by future generations.