Art zooms in on perception of SA white women
From her days as a young girl growing up in Transkei, Nelson Mandela University photography lecturer Heidi Saayman Hattingh’s late great aunt Molly Smith always had a camera in hand, which produced a photo album of her growth until a matured age.
Images from Smith’s photo album are featured in Saayman Hattingh’s photographic exhibition SITE: Engaging the archive, at the university’s Bird Street gallery until December 12.
When Saayman Hattingh discovered Smith’s album, she engaged the archive, often reflecting her own view of the photos by zooming in to focus on certain objects of the photo other than Smith’s structure.
The album is one of the photographer’s tools to challenge the perception of white South African women.
“Because I don’t even know the people in the albums, I was more concerned about knowing about myself, who I am and where I come from.
“So when I engaged the photographs, I engaged with place, objects, plants and tried to understand the past through zooming in,” she said.
The photos include Smith role-playing as a dancer in a white dress. “At this stage she had started role-playing and she truly believed she had the ability to become a dancer or actress or movie star, yet she was a little girl growing up in a trading station in Transkei.
“That’s how strong the cultural links were, that she actually saw herself as a British subject although she was born and grew up in the Eastern Cape in SA,” Saayman Hattingh said.
Smith, who was born in 1914 and died in 2008, was a white, middle-class South African of Scottish descent and among the first generation of her family to be born in this country.
“SITE brings together private narrative, family albums and public historical narrative in the form of popular media to question the naturalised understanding of white English-speaking South African women.”
The exhibition is part of her practice-PhD at Stellenbosch University and includes handwritten captions from Smith’s album, a digital version of the original album and audio of Transkei residents responding to Hattingh’s work.
● SITE: Engaging the archive runs until December 12. The gallery is open from 9am to 5pm on weekdays.