Tell It to the Mountains | Roundtable
Research 10 December 2020
A still frame from the video recording of a roundtable discussion that accompanied the ‘Tell It to the Mountains’ exhibition in A4’s gallery. A top-down view of a table that is strewn with postcard-size reproductions of photographs by Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky, with participants seated around it.
Roundtable: Harvest Live for Tell It to the Mountains, December 10, 2020. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title Tell It to the Mountains | Roundtable Dates 10 December 2020 Location Gallery Tagline Practitioner-friends gather around Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky’s work to offer reflections on their photographic projects and the intricacies of image-making. Credits

Participating practitioners:
Thembinkosi Goniwe
Khanya Mashabela
Sean O'Toole 
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Mikhael Subotzky

"Photographs are like infidels – without captions or anything, they're just loose, you just take whatever, you interpret it how you want to, you know? And maybe that's the beauty of infidels. Maybe that's also their betrayal."
– Lindokuhle Sobekwa

In lieu of the exhibition opening (postponed due to a fire in a neighbouring building), three practitioners writing for Tell it to the Mountains joined Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky in a roundtable discussion. Postcard-sized prints of the artists' images offered themselves as prompts, and a brown-paper tablecloth lent itself to note-taking. The conversation followed a meandering path of segues and suppositions, touching on such wide-ranging topics as semiotics, ancestry, and horizon lines. Set in the centre of the half-hung gallery, the table became a productive and generative site of exchange. Such engagements are central to A4's expanded definition of the exhibition, which shifts away from staid finality towards the provisional; pursuing processes and prototyping strategies, and facilitating practitioner-led dialogues.

"Photographers seldom acknowledge how much they are looking to play out internal dialogues onto the world, unconsciously or consciously. Photography can be a betrayal of the subject – is always a betrayal of the subject – and perhaps it's a betrayal in a deeper, almost metaphysical sense too. The photograph can never stand for the experience or the object. It creates the illusion of empathy when, in truth, it's an expression of your internal violence or anger or fear."
– Mikhael Subotzky

"Having looked at your photography and how it has been changing, it seems you feel like you failed your own sense of obligation. With other artists, their obligations are largely to themselves and their vision. I wonder how much you feel that your obligation to the subject is outweighed by your obligations to the environment in which the work is shown, and to the audience?"
– Khanya Mashabela

"I've realised over time how important lineages and chronologies are in relationships and in how photographers understand what they do. Their conversations are very intimate, wrapped up in biography."
– Sean O'Toole

"I'm asking 'what is it that is at play other than that which I know or I see?' That, for me, enriches us because now we are searching for things that are not self-evident. We are forced to pay attention to subtleties, to nuances. We are forced to open up the images for other possibilities; to understand – that's the complexity of life."
– Thembinkosi Goniwe

Event photograph from the roundtable discussion that accompanied the ‘Tell It to the Mountains’ exhibition in A4’s gallery. A close-up view of a table covered in brown paper and strewn with postcard size printouts of Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky’s photographs.
Event photograph from the roundtable discussion that accompanied the ‘Tell It to the Mountains’ exhibition in A4’s gallery. A close-up view of the process of Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s paper and photo-collage ‘Mthimkhulu II’ on the gallery wall.
Event photograph from the roundtable discussion that accompanied the ‘Tell It to the Mountains’ exhibition in A4’s gallery. Lidokuhle Sobekwa’s photograph 'Ziyanda Omabalabala’ is mounted on the white wall over an enlarged print of a notebook page from Sobekwa’s ‘I carry Her photo with Me’ project.

"I'm interested in this situation where the pictures come together, where these essays and photographs are combining yet can also be separated."
– Josh Ginsburg

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.

"Poetry can be open to dishonesty."
– Khanya Mashabela

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.

"What's interesting to me about photography, social and documentary photography in particular, is how it functions in its obligations to its subjects and audience.
– Khanya Mashabela

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.

"Umngqameko speaks of the far distance, looking towards that which can never be reached."
– 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. 

"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. 

"I’m reluctant to claim catharsis for myself or anyone – that a work can make something ‘come unstuck’."
– Mikhael Subotzky

At the first Live Harvest for Tell It to the Mountains, invited practitioners George Mahashe and Federica Angelucci engage with the artists and A4 team in thinking through the exhibition.

"I'm often very reluctant to make the conversation about photography." 
– Mikhael Subotzky

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. 

"The surface of the wall becomes another dimension of photography or image-making: space, time, and then texture."
– Mikhael Subotzky

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. 

"In some ways, it feels like I'm the last of a certain kind of breed of photographer – and that Lindo perhaps is the first of another kind."
– Mikhael Subotzky

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. 

"I'm wondering more about the idea of betrayal, which seems implicit in photography."
– Sean O’Toole

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.

"I've realised over time how important lineages and chronologies are in relationships, and in how photographers understand what they do."
– Sean O’Toole

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.

"What is it that is at play other than that which I know or I see?"
– Thembinkosi Goniwe

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.

"What happens when you suspend this name or designation ‘photography' and we think instead of the economy of the image?"
– Thembinkosi Goniwe

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.

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