"The Polaroid controversy in South Africa in 1977 may offer a starting point because it points to Polaroid’s ID system, which was commercialised around the world. This is a reflection of a broader tendency to attempt to identify and ‘format’ people. I’m interested in the role that Polaroid – and photography in general – have played in this system of control."
– Chiara Agradi

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"I have been thinking about the idea of representation, self-representation, control of the image through photography, particularly instant and automatic photography."
– Chiara Agradi

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"Photo booth and automatic photography are interesting to me because of the contrast of their two primary uses. On one hand, they are used for institutional purposes like passport and ID pictures, acting as tools of the imposed systems of control. On the other hand, they are used to capture moments of intimacy: taking a photograph with your romantic partner, your friends, or alone."
– Chiara Agradi

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"Lisetta Carmi is an important Italian photographer, and the first in Italy to document the lives of transgender people. She was based in Genova in the early 1960s, a city which was known at the time for its underground art scene. Her work is a poignant example of freedom of representation through photography."
– Chiara Agradi

Chiara Agradi joins Khanya Mashabela and Josh Ginsburg in conversation in anticipation of her curatorial residency.

"Nicole Gravier is a French artist working in Italy. During the 1970s, she developed Fotoromanzi, a series of artworks inspired by a genre of books of the same name. These books are visual, depicting love stories in which the protagonists are represented as silly women desperately waiting for a man to come home at night. Gravier plays with and makes fun of the genre, staging photos of herself on beds and sofas, captioned with phrases like, ‘I can’t live without you!’ and ‘Please, come back home! I feel lost without you.’ In these images, she is often surrounded by romance novels but also by books written by philosophers like Carla Lonzi and Hegel."
– Chiara Agradi

Chiara Agradi joins Khanya Mashabela and Josh Ginsburg in conversation in anticipation of her curatorial residency.

"How is intimacy performed and created, and where is it simulated and falsified?"
– Josh Ginsburg

Chiara Agradi joins Khanya Mashabela and Josh Ginsburg in conversation in anticipation of her curatorial residency.

"Unlike film where you can print as many pictures as you’d like from the negative, the Polaroid is a singular form, like a drawing. It’s a unique object."
– Kemang Wa Lehulere

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"I found the idea of forensics interesting. Kemang Wa Lehulere described making the works in the World of Nat Nakasa series as an attempt to gather traces of Nakasa’s thoughts and ideas through gestures, and then arranging them in this storyboard-like form to create an abstracted narrative. It is an attempt to build an image of who this stranger might be.

I think it is similar to Kathryn Smith’s work in the Psychogeographies series. It is also what we do as researchers with archival photos and artworks. What one ends up with is a perception of someone, which can never be fully whole."
– Khanya Mashabela

Chiara Agradi joins Khanya Mashabela and Josh Ginsburg in conversation in anticipation of her curatorial residency.

"One of the things I was thinking about is the idea of constructing, reconstructing, deconstructing through photography. Breaking down an image to its essence, or trying to build an image of somebody, or recreating an image of yourself. Photography as a tool."
– Khanya Mashabela

Chiara Agradi joins Khanya Mashabela and Josh Ginsburg in conversation in anticipation of her curatorial residency.

"In Moshekwa’s True Confessions self-portraits (1999), it feels like he’s performing for himself. His body language seems informed by popstars and ‘Page Three’ girls. He’s taking ownership of or reflecting on a very ‘public-facing’ sexuality."
– Khanya Mashabela

Chiara Agradi joins Khanya Mashabela and Josh Ginsburg in conversation in anticipation of her curatorial residency.

"Photographs are like infidels."
– Lindokuhle Sobekwa

At the roundtable discussion for Tell It to the Mountains, invited practitioners Thembinkosi Goniwe, Khanya Mashabela, and Sean O'Toole engage with the artists and A4 team in thinking through the exhibition. 

"Most amateurs would have used the Kodak version of the instant camera, as they were almost half the price of the Polaroid cameras. In the 1980s in Cape Town, we sold the Kodak instant camera all of the time."
– Roland Erikson

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"We were at the opening event of my residency in the South African National Gallery’s Annexe, and Ray [Alexander] looked so great sitting in a chair. I didn’t have a camera with me (it was before smartphones) but Kathy Grundlingh, the photography curator at the SANG, had a Polaroid camera. I asked her to take the shot. She took two versions: In one, Ray is sitting with her hands on the arms of the chair. In the other, she is leaning sideways, with her hand under her chin. Using my Canon CLC 500 copier, I enlarged the images of Ray from the Polaroids and turned them into prints, shown on the wall and as part of the sculpture, exhibited in my retrospective at the South African National Gallery. The entire installation, A Chair for Ray Alexander (1990–1992), was based on those two Polaroids taken casually in a few seconds."
– Sue Williamson

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"What struck me and attracted me to these unclaimed photographs was that they were of people performing their best selves for the camera. And we will never know who their imagined audience might have been. They made my heart ache. How melancholic it is to commission an image that becomes orphaned. These images are orphans."
– Terry Kurgan

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.

"The Joubert Park photographers had unintentionally created an informal archive of the social history of Johannesburg’s inner city at a particular time in its history. They might have kept the unclaimed photographs because they believed someone would eventually come back for them one day, but I also think it was because of their respect for the meaning of a photographic portrait, and the sense of it being a real part of the person who had commissioned it."
– Terry Kurgan

Invited practitioners join Khanya Mashabela in conversation, tracing the role of instant photography in their respective practices.