adventures in photography

We all know that I am a questing addict, and if you didn’t you do now, and today I went on a bit of a different type of questing mission and attacked the Tzaneen library where the is a very friendly librarian who tried to convince me into going into digital videos. When I got to the library I headed for my favourite section (I’ll give you one guess and a clue: they don’t have a scifi section) and started devouring a book on graphic printing in South Africa and when I was done with that I went back to place my book in its slot, saddened that the last person who had actually checked it out had returned the book in 2008.

The Tzaneen library is a sad place but it seems to cope and there were quite a few people in it and I guess Tzaneen is not Pretoria and the fact that they only have six shelves of art books that have hardly been touched is to be expected of the area. Sad but true. All things considered it could be worse.

So, after I had successfully devoured all the printing books they had I sighed as I looked at all the painting books (barely any drawing books and no sculpture books I could find) and LEARN HOW TO BE THE MOST AMAZING ARTIST THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN IN A WEEKEND self-help books my eyes found an amazing book - protruding from the shelf and begging to be touched. The font resembled handwriting and in black the title “DISPOSABLES” was scrawled down the spine. Curiosity almost killed the cat and I lifted it from the shelf and seated myself at a table.

The book is a collection of photos by Brett Morris who decided to start a project in which he paid people who were the “disposables” of South Africa to take photos on a couple of disposable cameras. These photographs of the underbelly of South Africa got my heart racing. These photos by the unemployed, car guards and homeless were some of the most beautiful I had ever seen. If there had ever been photographs of people these were them. The street scenes and their familiar settings bound together with their stories was pure magic. I felt full after that viewing.

I’ve never been a huge enthusiast of photography but recently I have had some more exposure and it is really fascinating stuff but that is all another story for another day. Anyway, I have never actually seriously tried photography – the last I did fine art wise photography was nearly two and a half years ago and it was simple pinhole photography which was quite amazing and a lot of fun but not enough to make it stick with me – but this book had me scribbling in my diary to find out about disposable cameras and later that day when I walked past Fujifilm I went in and made a bit of an irrational purchase.

I am excited and nervous and all those other weird feeling that come with a new project. Sometimes I think that I will never learn from some of my irrational behavior but maybe it is better that way.