PHOTOGRAPHY
A true story
For much of his childhood, photographer Jansen van Staden’s father, Tjaart ,was an absent figure. As his son recalls, “My mom and dad divorced when I was four and subsequently we travelled a lot through South Africa with my mom — me and my brother — looking for work. We counted the other day and we figured out that we must have ended up moving about 24 times by the time I was 18. We got used to travelling and used to spending time in the car and used to saying goodbye to friends and making new friends and changing from school to school.”
During this time, Jansen and his brother Joubert would see their father once or twice a year, “maybe for a birthday or something”. As the brothers grew older their father began to reappear more often in their lives. “In the time we spent with my dad, the little time that we did, we really soaked up everything that he had to say … We really looked up to him a lot and when he left I would cry the whole day. He was our hero and he was a really cool guy.”
Jansen knew his father had spent time in his youth serving in the South African Defence Force during the apartheid border wars, but he never really spoke about that. Tjaart had spent his life working in Africa, developing a successful sustainable development model for training local communities in the execution of infrastructure megaprojects, empowering people to be able to reap the benefits of such projects and creating a programme that was so successful that it was eventually bought by the World Bank. His work took him all over sub-Saharan Africa.
It was while on a job in Kenya in 2011 that Tjaart van Staden was killed. The microlight he’d hired to enable him to take aerial photographs of the area was hit by a down draft and plummeted to the ground. Tjaart was killed on impact, his camera still around his neck.
Six years later, after travelling to Kenya for a Goethe Institute Master Class and using the opportunity to visit the crash site with his brother Joubert, Jansen discovered a letter his father had written to his therapist detailing horrific acts he’d participated in during the border war as a 17-year-old. He included a line that chilled the young photographer. It read simply: “She stated that I joined and did what I did because I wanted to kill people. It is truer than true.”
Questions about who his father had really been and what he’d done sent Jansen on a three-year journey to try to understand his father and to find out what had happened to him. He wanted to know why his father’s experiences had caused a rift between him and his conservative Afrikaans family.
The results of that journey are presented in Microlight , a singular, boundary pushing South African photobook that mirrors the journey undertaken by its creator from anger and uncertainty to acceptance and reconciliation.
Combining family photographs, photos taken by Jansen during a trip accompanying his father on one of his work projects and portraits of his family taken during his discussion with them about his father, it presents its careful and subtle collection of
images without any initial information or explanation of what they depict or how they might work together.
As the reader pages through the book, links begin to appear, historical realities begin to cast their long shadows. A new way of thinking about how photography can be used as a medium to examine the deeply ingrained and often unclear relationships between the present and the past exerts itself through the book’s construction as an object that’s aware of the links between its form and its philosophical, emotional and intellectual concerns.
When you get to the end of the book and read the anecdotal captions, you want to start again from the beginning, conscious of how your understanding of the work has changed because of the snippets of information that have been provided.
As Jansen explains: “It may look confusing because it jumps between narratives but I like it like that, I did it on purpose. It’s a nonlinear narrative because the history of South Africa is so complex and hard to find. It’s even more difficult with the medium of photography, so I had to focus on my story and that’s where the narratives link. It’s my story. It’s not about my father’s time in the war, it’s not about me sympathising with white perpetrators or anything like that. It’s just me unravelling the history of my father and my father’s family and coming to terms with it.
“So the story does kind of look deurmekaar but there’s a narrative to it. The captions at the back are there for a purpose because I want the reader of the book to engage with the photographs first … the book becomes an object where you have to turn back and figure it out again.”
Having won a Contemporary African Photography Award last year, and with preorders for the book selling fast, it seems that Jansen’s commitment to the wisdom espoused by legendary New York street photographer Helen Levitt that, “the more specific the work is, the more general it becomes”, is paying off.
Reflecting on how his understanding of his late father has changed as a result of the project, Jansen sees that when he was younger, during the visits he and his brother would have with his father, everything his father said was soaked up.
“We were like dry sponges waiting for water. He would sometimes drop lines of wisdom and little jokes that we’d remember. One of the things he told me was the story of Freud and the theory that the son should kill the father in order to become his own man.
“I was very young when he told me that but I understand it now. I think that’s what happened in this process.
“He’s not this perfect man who I aspired to be. He’s a human being with incredible faults but I have a lot of respect for the journey that he decided to take. If he and my mother hadn’t divorced and he’d stayed on as my father in that context, with that trauma, I would not be the person that I am today.”
A limited edition of 300 are available to preorder. E-mail: microlightbook@gmail.com. Jansen van Staden will be in conversation with Neptune Alexandre and Helena Uambemebe in a webinar moderated by John Fleetwood on November 11 at 4.30pm. Register at phototool.co.za