Читать книгу Street Knowledge - King ADZ - Страница 26

Araminta has a great story about how she got into photography and subsequently how she shot two different sides to South African — more specifically, Cape Town — life. ‘Prison gang tattoos and matric’ dresses’ for her first exhibition. (Matric’ is short for Matriculation and is when you spend your last year at high school and graduate, like the US high school prom. Then you have a graduation party and this is when the dress comes in!) The moment I spotted her work I knew that she had something special and I had to get her in here. I’ll let her tell you her story in her own words…

‘I did an architecture course in England but what I really liked was shuffling around London looking at sites I was given. I really enjoyed that bit. And then I studied it at St Martins, which was quite an odd course as it hadn’t really started as a course properly, it was just me and another girl. I had walked in off the street and said “Do you do a photography post-graduate?” and so they said, “No, but talk to the tutor who basically had to shoot all the fashion,” and he was rather bored. So he made us a course, which was lovely. And what happened was by then I had a terrible drug habit and everything went a bit pear-shaped for years and then I came out to Cape Town for treatment and rehab. I just locked myself in the darkroom in London and used it as an excuse to do what I wanted and when I came out to South Africa I started shooting properly and also I found that I had all these ideas.

‘It was because of the drug stuff that enabled me to meet the 28s and the 26s [prison gangs], really. When I came out here I had the most horrendous scars, almost disfiguring, on my face, but when I met the prison gangs, the first thing I thought was that the tattoos were such a rich art form in their own right, and I found it so fascinating, and also interesting because of my own scars. Which were nothing compared to the branding that the gangsters get from their face tattoos. It was very healing for me to see this. I had empathy for them as I had made my face peculiar as well. But I had the best year and a half with them because they are like the most amazing men and their stories are incredible. The tattoo is a kind of way for a human being to express themself when they have had everything else taken away.

‘I actually was going to do the matric’ photos across the board, all the people, but I became really interested in the Cape Flats (a notorious area of Cape Town, (>p270)) where the kids there have the best dresses, the most imagination for the one night they can style on. It was quite grinding to shoot the gangsters and I was quite happy to shoot something fun. The girls were full of self-expression and really into making a statement. They all think about the dress they are gonna wear for about five years and the parents spend every penny on it and it’s all focused on the one moment when they step out of their blockhouse in Mannenburg and the whole neighbourhood turns and looks at you and they all go wild. Just unbelievable…’