Pillars of the community A Proposal for a Photographic Project

There is a powerful story to be told about the creativity and determination that has been shown as a multitude of ways have been found to house the generations of the new SA. Houses will provide a theme but a variety of ways will be found to explore the experience of a diversity of South Africans.

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There is a famous photo, popular as a postcard, showing a view of Durban but stretching all the way back to the mountains of the Drakensberg. The N3 motorway allows one to cover the ground between.

This is a photographic project about the people and the houses that inhabit the fantastically diverse landscapes across that part of SA. The project will involve explore areas on either side of the motorway that runs from the sea (at the bottom) to the sky (at the top) in the picture on the postcard.

Modern digital cameras make it possible to work equally expressively in colour or monochrome (B&W). This project aims to capture diversity working in B&W and colour across a variety of genre: portraits, interiors, landscapes, still lives.

I cannot pretend to the skill and dedication that characterized the work of David Goldblatt across more than six decades and across a range of photographic genre. But his diverse and rich work will inevitably inform my own on this project. Like David, I will also draw inspiration from the work of American photographers, Walker Evans and Ansel Adams.

Walker Evans is still the most important and influential American photographer. His 1938 photobook, American Photographs, was not a bestseller at the time but many, many great photographers have described the impact of the their first encounter with it.

Throughout the 1930s Walker Evans travelled the American South capturing its people, its buildings and its way of life. His interest in architecture and structure led him to capture rough-shod 'vernacular' structures as well as the pretenstions of the many abandoned plantation mansions. Together with the writer James Agee, Evans spent weeks visiting, indeed, living with, three very, very poor families of share-croppers for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Also during the 1930s, Ansel Adams was producing unforgettable images that were an education in how to look at the American landscape. David Goldblatt was a master printer of his own photos, and schooled in the Zone System Adams had popularised.

The work of SAfrican photographer, David Goldblatt drew inspiration from both and provided a model of best documentary practice.

Obtaining sponsors ensures the visibility and legacy of the project. Possible sponsors who will be approached include: the archives and libraries of the twinned cities of Durban and Leeds, the Bauman Lyons architectural practice, Fuji cameras, Hahnemühle and other prestige photo papers, the KZN gallery amongst others.

The involvement of PhotoFirst could enable the development of a community dimension to the project. Five very different communities could be encouraged to take photos of their own communities to document their lives and express their hopes.

The following photos were snapped on a phone from a car travelling through KwaZulu-Natal in October 2024. They are not perfectly framed or processed but they give just a hint of the lives and worlds that might be explored through this project.

About the title of this project ...

From the snapshots above you can see that many of the simplest, poorest houses have been embellished by the addition of pillars - sometimes even just a single pillar.

It was the grand plantation houses of the American South that developed that element of Ancient Greece into an aspect of 'domestic' architecture, as evidenced in the following photos by Walker Evans.