LANGUAGE OF PIXELS
A photographer tells an urban culture story
Before he became the creative director of Bubblegum Club — a cultural intelligence agency based in Johannesburg that helps brands understand and engage with contemporary South African youth culture — Jamal Nxedlana had a successful fashion label, Missshape, that thrived on collaborations with cutting-edge local talent and an eye-pleasing aesthetic. This previous iteration of his talent laid the groundwork for his success with Bubblegum Club as a platform for highlighting youth culture from within. Click on their online magazine and you’ll immediately notice Nxedlana’s powerful images created in collaboration with stylists and make-up artists which, according to the site, “tap into grunge, DIY approaches to styling and photographic strategies, plugging into references that are reflective of visual languages present in urban subcultures”. It’s no wonder, then, that these images were selected to be part of the 2018 Aperture Summer Open, an annual open-submission exhibition at Aperture Foundation’s gallery in New York, on until August 16.
His inclusion in the exhibition is a major honour for Nxedlana and Bubblegum Club, curated by senior photo editor of the New Yorker, Siobhán Bohnacker; Brendan Embser, the managing editor of Aperture magazine; photo editor of New York magazine Marvin Orellana; and Antwaun Sargent, independent writer and critic.
This year’s exhibition is called The Way We Live Now and features photographers who have created images that capture and become visual markers of rapid change in society, politics, beauty and self-expression.
Nxedlana, who interned at Dazed and Confused in London for two years, was one of 18 artists and photographers selected from more than 1 000 submissions for the show.
The works include powerful chronicles of the crises of opioid addiction and mass incarceration; multilayered portrayals of Latinx, Native American and queer communities; sweeping accounts of the built environment from Israel to China; and prismatic meditations on African-American and diaspora culture, gender, and fashion.
“The theme related to the sense that my work uses photography to celebrate and put the spotlight on people who we at Bubblegum Club feel are shaping the city’s cultural landscape,” says Nxedlana. “Through their work they are documenting the local urban scene and we in turn are documenting them.”
The images they submitted were chosen by Bubblegum Club to showcase different aspects of the work, including cover shoots and editorials.
“Photographs are extremely important in documenting societies,” says Nxedlana, “especially when there are diverse photographers engaging in this documentation with diverse points of view.”
He describes his photographs as “style portraits” that use style as a medium to express ideas or feelings.
“The work was very well received,” he says. “People reacted positively to vibrancy of the colours, the unusual hair and styling and were also interested in the subjects.”
He admits to feeling honoured to have exhibited with the other impressive submissions. “I really liked [artist] Shikeith’s work,” says Nxedlana. “His presentation consisted of a video work and a single portrait that was quiet but at the same time very strong.”
Portraits, it seems, really appeal to the photographer. “I love photographing people because I find the body is a powerful vehicle for storytelling,” he says. “I let the people I photograph tell the story of their surroundings and their culture. The construction of the image becomes a condensed moment in time, a contextualised mirror of current ways of being.”
But the photographer finds it hard to pinpoint exactly what makes his photographs successful. “I think it’s something that can’t be pinned down. The magic is elusive — either it’s in the picture or it’s not. For me it’s the elements like subject, lighting and composition that make a photograph work. But most importantly it’s how these elements combine that creates the magic.”
Though there weren’t direct comments by the curators about the work, Nxedlana says that just being selected was an honour.
“It motivates and inspires me to dedicate myself to the craft and to create more work that has a big impact.” LS