ROADSIDE ATTRACTION
An art-book collection of 100 newspaper posters paints a picture of our cultural psyche, writes Tymon Smith
THEY’RE everywhere — you see them as you sit in traffic in the morning and overnight they change, bringing new chuckles with their short, sharp teasers of what we can expect in the pages of the day.
They are the newspaper street posters we’ve become so accustomed to — what Laurence Hamburger, the compiler of a book collecting five years’ worth, refers to as “tweets in a mechanical age”, the visual indications of a country in constant flux.
Perhaps, over the years, particularly good ones have caught your eye. Perhaps you’ve parked your car and rushed over to a streetlamp to extract them from their holders — the ones that bear your name or mark a significant event — and maybe you’ve taken them home and put them on the wall. The Radium Beer Hall in Joburg is marked by the collection decorating its walls, reminding you “Your Bra can Kill You” and warning, “The Situation is Vrot with Danger.”
However, if, like Hamburger, you try to get serious about collecting street posters, you may find that the only way to do this is to comb the streets and jump out and grab the ones that catch your fancy — newspapers don’t archive them, printers don’t keep them; they have the lifespan of mayflies.
A filmmaker and commercials director who lived overseas for over a decade, Hamburger first began to think about street posters as cultural objects when he returned to South Africa in 2010. Now that he’s published a book called Frozen Chicken Train Wreck, which presents them as objects in an art-book format, many people may have one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” moments.
Co-published by Chopped Liver Press and Ditto Press in the UK, the book presents the posters in miniature form, each on a separate page with blank pages facing them.
So, the functional sales-point mechanism of the newspaper business is elevated to the status of three-colour-printed, triple-decked word art, the whole presenting a strange narrative of five years of South African popular history and culture through the eyes of the journalists tasked with creating them.
Below his balcony, the traffic rushes by on Louis Botha Avenue (one of the better locations in Joburg for the collection of street posters) as Hamburger ponders the nature of his role in the creation of the book. “I’m called the author but I’ve curated it and edited, more than being a writer. It’s something quite similar to film, which is where I’m from: sequencing things and finding how stories or events, when they play with other stories or events, have a third effect. So maybe in the experience of reading the book, you go beyond each individual poster and start to experience a broader narrative, which was the idea.”
As to what that narrative might be, Hamburger is reluctant to place too much of an authorial stamp on the story, preferring instead to see the collection as a “general reflection of what I’ve found over the past five years in the country — this is the vox pop, the noise that our media has made about our world. Obviously it’s couched in humorous terms, which makes it accessible, but that’s part of what makes it uniquely South African in that it’s had to do that to make people read it and also to not make them so uncomfortable about the news that they feel they can’t cope.”
Some may see the lack of any context for the headlines as problematic. After all, these are words that refer to actual stories about real people and events and there is no further information given in the book. That’s a decision that Hamburger and his publishers made, based partly on budgetary constraints but also as a conscious design choice that allows for more freedom on the part of readers to make their own interpretations. Does it help that much to know that the story to which the book title refers was a wire item about something that happened in Texas?
When selling the book at the recent Art Book Fair at New York’s PS1 Gallery, Hamburger was amused to see Americans reacting to the headlines as if they had been made up because there is something uniquely South African about them for which overseas audiences don’t have a reference point.
In the US and the UK, the digital world has seen advertising for newspapers moving onto digital platforms such as LED displays and sensationalist wordplay is to be found within the pages of the newspapers rather than on lampposts.
Many of the posters distort facts for impact and there are numerous Daily Sun representatives. But Hamburger feels that, over the past few years, “all our media has turned towards that in a way — some of it is the result of things like the Daily Sun, the rise of social media, television and especially reality television dominating the world. All these things are sensationalist engines in society and the press is not immune.
“To blame the Daily Sun, though, is very one-dimensional and in this country it’s important to realise that things are not one-dimensional, they’re not black and white.”
The South Africa that emerges is a place of rape, murder and police corruption but it’s also a place that has a wryly cynical way of looking at itself. That, contrary to the accusations of negativity the government is prone to level at the media, reflects for Hamburger, “a strangely positive quality. Not positive as in good but positive in the sense that they find ways of talking about these things that show the terror and absurdity and that allows you to see how wrong things are and how we have to change and work on them.”
He’s still got plenty of posters left over and plans are afoot for a second book but for now this small gallery of 100 shouts from the roadside provides a fascinating peek into the psyche of the nation. It is also an engaging example of what happens when a curious observer looks beyond the attention-seeking business of selling the news.
• Frozen Chicken Train Wreck is distributed in SA by Fourthwall Books, R390. www.fourthwallbooks.com. The book will be launched in Cape Town at Clarke’s Bookshop, 199 Long Street, on Friday at 6pm.