Richard Mark Dobson – The Crest Hotel
david alan harvey. You could enjoy many hours reading photo-media projects on this site and glad I found it, I found it being drawn by a really nicely written blog called Images of my Thoughts.
Crafting a good narrative is extremely hard, it is what many photojournalists struggle. I have many friends that take such wonderful photographs but can't sell the story, while other photographers have stories continuously published but their images are lacking in that special wow factor. This piece by Mark Dobson, fascinated me, not sure why exactly.
I remember visiting a photography exhibition at The Photographers Gallery many years ago, there was a piece called Outland by Roger Ballen. A mixture of documentary and art, Ballen created the images with the poor white farmers in south Africa.
I remember the abolishment of apartheid on TV, it left lasting images. I remember watching the news and the reports of the White farmers loosing their farms, looting and murder. It left me a polarised view that white people in SA are rich and black are poor. And did not really think much about South Africa once it left the news, until I viewed Outlanders.
I will never forget what I saw, I could not understand the images I was seeing, and still struggle. And I do not know why and that bothers me, South Africa is a place that holds fascination, but I really don’t want to go there, I feel uncomfortable writing that and uncomfortable admitting it. I was raised up in a working class, fairy multicultural family, I have experienced "relatively speaking" rich times and poor times. So what was the impact Outland had on me? Why was I so shocked to see poor white people in South Africa?
Maybe it was because of the media and the images I am confronted with, and I am used to seeing poor people from other countries so much more, I was shocked at my self for realising this stereotype is deep in my perceptions about the word, of course I know that poverty is not discriminatory. Much has changed since apartheid, and as the world is becoming more multicultural, I feel there is a still along way to go, because how do you change perceptions that you have no control that you have learned, if you grow up with one way of thinking, what needs to be in place for a person to challenge their perception of the world?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment