The power of photography
Daylin Paul goes to the coalface
Daylin Paul, winner of the Ernest Cole Award for Photography, grew up in working-class Durban. It was there that he remembers his late father giving him his first camera for his ninth or 10th birthday — a pink compact — with strict instructions not to open the back and expose the film. Young Daylin, while on a holiday at his aunt’s house in Port Elizabeth, took pictures during the day and then at night would turn on the bedside lamp, open the back of the camera and stare at the film, wondering where the pictures were. Since then a different kind of exposure has been firmly at the heart of Paul’s practice as a photojournalist.
When he was 16, Paul’s older brother went to study law at the University of Cape Town, leaving his brother alone in their shared Chatsworth bedroom where Daylin found a series of magazines on the Vietnam War. Opening up a special photo issue of the series, he was immediately entranced by Nick Ut’s famous black and white, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “Napalm Girl”, depicting the naked, nineyear-old Vietnamese girl Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a road after being severely burnt in a napalm attack. As Paul recalls it now: “I was sitting there, 16 years old, looking at this and I started to trip and I was like, I’ve never seen this girl, this happened 30 years ago, I have no connection to her and it’s on the other side of the world in a different time, but no matter what anybody tells me — what I see in that picture is wrong. So I was never interested in photographing cars or models or anything like that, it was always photojournalism.”
It was a passion that led him to study photojournalism at Rhodes University before working as a staff photographer for the Cape Times and the Cape Argus and later as a freelancer for publications such as the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times. It was while out on a job in 2015 with the late Sunday Times journalist Lucky Sibaye that Paul found himself in the town of Secunda, in Mpumalanga, for the first time. On his first night in the Graceland Hotel, Paul found himself sitting on his bed, looking out at the towers of the coal power station Secunda CTS bellowing out constant flames into the quiet of the night. The experience recalled “Lord of the Rings — Sauron’s Eye. I thought to myself, how did we get here and who OK’d this? And that’s where it started.”
That experience spurred Paul to investigate the environmental and social effects of coal power on the towns surrounding the many power stations scattered around the province. The resulting exhibition and accompanying book consist of about 70 black and white images, whittled down from a total of 9,847 pictures taken over the course of the past few years that present a story of social and environmental degradation that has been allowed to continue pretty much unchanged and unabated for decades.
Titled Broken Land, the collection begins with aerial photographs of the seemingly legendary natural beauty of the province before Paul’s lens zooms ever closer in for a look at the realities on the ground. There pollution is rampant; those who are not lucky enough to find employment in the power industry are forced into dangerous subsistence mining for survival and many residents of towns and informal settlements that abut the power stations are without a proper water or electricity supply and suffer from diseases such as TB.
Paul says: “In the beginning I was driven by emotion, and that emotion was mostly outrage. I thought, and I continue to believe, that this is a travesty. South Africans — regardless of race and culture and whatever else — there are a couple of things that we all have as common denominators — almost everybody likes a braai, almost everybody likes a tipple and there are very few South Africans that I’ve ever met who don’t love the land.”
He also believes that as South Africans “we’re very blessed because for a relatively small country we’re so biodiverse, and I think we’re very proud of that”.
However, Paul feels that “when it comes to colonialism — to be honest — I think the indigenous brown and black people of the world had a much better connection with the land until the moment that the colonial experience happened and that connection was broken. Now the land is just a place where you put up a house or you dig for something.”
The land is thus broken not only by the mistreatment of it and its residents by large power corporations but also by the historical deterioration of traditional bonds and values, and of course by the imminent threats of climate change to land all over the world. When Paul hears US President Donald Trump talking about “clean coal”, his experiences in Mpumalanga lead him to react with disdain and outrage because “there’s no such thing”.
While he acknowledges that in other parts of the country there are more environmentally friendly approaches that have been adopted such as wind farming and solar power, Paul believes that when it comes to SA’s coal industry: “We’re addicted to coal like cigarettes, and like big tobacco there’s an industry behind coal that needs us to depend on it.”
Paul hopes that his photographs will engender outrage, shock and hurt in viewers as they see the realities of what the industry is doing to people and the land. He knows that “it’s easy for me to get up on my high horse because my job allows me to engage with this every day. I think it’s much harder for the average person to think about climate change. What are we going to do? It’s urgent and we’re feeling it every year.” He is adamant that the project, while reflecting a subject that piqued his own personal interest and investigations, “is not about me — it’s about driving this point home for posterity. If we survive as a civilisation people will know that this is what life was like under coal.”
‘If we survive as a civilisation people will know that this is what life was like under coal’
Broken Land opens at the Wits Art Museum at 6.30pm on October 8 and runs until October 27.