Feni’s images capture the familiar in unfamiliar places
This is an extract from ‘A Drain on Our Dignity’ showcasing images by Masixole Feni and stories about the photographer. Masixole’s images tell the story of inequality and spatial injustice emanating from use of land informed by economic exclusion
I first encountered Masixole Feni’s photographs in GroundUp, an online news agency that reports on publicinterest stories concerning governance, social movements and spatial injustice.
One image has stayed in my mind and is perhaps also a thumbnail of our long-term research collaboration.
The image is of the Tafelberg school in Sea Point, Cape Town, the site of a highly controversial development proposal between the provincial government and private developers, but social housing activists are pushing for the site to be allocated to conveniently located affordable housing for the poor.
In many ways, this image captures the common tale of South African land use and development and the architecture it produces.
For me, working in Cape Town as an architect and researcher in spatial justice, I read the contemporary world essentially through the actions of people on land, past and present.
How those actions are captured visually becomes extremely important in looking for wisdom on how to intervene through the production of architecture and space in ethical and imaginative ways.
I consider myself fortunate to have encountered Feni’s work because his images consistently capture and visually note the complexity of contemporary urban society.
A Drain on our Dignity is a remarkable series of images depicting fragments of life in Cape Town.
Feni’s images depict the tension of the insider view/outsider reflection very well.
Rather than attempting to resolve the tension, they simply work to highlight his own sense of being part of the neighbourhoods that he photographs as well as embracing the distance created with the camera – of seeing the familiar in unfamiliar places.
His profession as a press photographer deepens the often simplified image of “beautiful Cape Town”, as he captures stories of people and their lives as they make use of the city in ways in which they earn, relax, care for others and deal with crises.
Townships and informal settlements like Mfuleni – where he lives – feature prominently on his map along with Khayelitsha, Philippi and Airport Industria.
But the inclusion of the double portrait of Ongezile Mkwehla and Siya Wandisa of Ntabankulu in the Eastern Cape shows Cape Town as many cities within a city, a microcosm of many cities in South Africa.
Cape Town’s contemporary struggles around development inequalities and service delivery is rooted in the past legacy of racialised spatial planning.
The main narrative in Feni’s images is lack of infrastructure to support the complexities and labour of everyday life – washing clothes, earning a living and caring for children.
I once asked him what compelled him to tell this story.
He said he was dissatisfied with the way in which the neighbourhoods that he knew well and the struggles that he was familiar with were being depicted in the mainstream media.
“Every day we read about people’s anger and frustration but we don’t get to see the other side. For me it was important to focus on what these people do to make life easy for themselves,” he said.
Perhaps the most moving element of the photographs in A Drain on our Dignity are the images of mothers and their young children.
It occurred to me that in his mission to document a fuller story of the vulnerability of township life, Feni was also in search of a poetic depiction of a specific human relationship: that of the relationship between parent and child.
‘‘ His images visually note complexity of temporary urban society
The recommended retail price is R220 and it is published by Jacana Media.