Elsa Bleda
Photographer and filmmaker
Elsa Bleda’s photographs are a display of aesthetic inventiveness that makes the viewer go back and question everything they’ve heard described as “unique”.
Predominantly streetscapes, characterised by their just-almost-overblown but perfectly subtle saturation of artificial colours, her images provide a perfectly non-cliché vision of scenes that might have seemed ordinary to many.
Her recent work started gaining prominence in South Africa’s mainstream art world and on arts blogs globally last year after the publishing of her collection of photos, titled Nightscapes, which capture the empty streetscapes of Johannesburg’s urban sprawl in all its vivid neon glory.
She describes the city as both “Gothic’’ in a way she’d never experienced and “so mysterious”, preferring to explore the city at night when it seems abandoned and can expose parts of its true self.
The images, which sometimes resemble stills from an art-house film, have the effect of glamorising otherwise inconsequentially pedestrian spaces by hinting at the beginning of a gritty, nostalgic working-class romantic drama of some kind.
There is an eerily Lynchian feel to those suggested narratives, prompting the potential to deep-dive into s o me t h i n g a t o n c e s u r r e a l a n d immediately everyday.
Music and lyrics seem to be intricately woven into her work and the titles she gives them, as well as in the way she describes the moment she captured a particular image, although she cites Japanese art director and designer Eiko Ishioka as her biggest influence, besides a fascination with sci-fi and East Asian cinema.
Bleda’s compelling work as an image-maker has earned her considerable press and this past week saw the release of her directorial debut for the remix to Kyle Deutsch’s radio single Can’t Get Enough, which Neon by night: An image from Elsa Bleda’s series
Nightscapes
exhibits her signature eerie drama and rich colouring.
The year ahead is even brighter, with an upcoming Red Bull exhibi- tion, more motion picture projects after signing with Star Films and putting work into a photography book.