A morning after (UmlindeloUmlindelo wamaKholwa)
Sabelo Mlangeni
Artwork 2016
Sabelo Mlangeni's monochrome photographic print 'A morning after (UmlindeloUmlindelo wamaKholwa)' shows two individuals standing on the ground.
Artwork: Sabelo Mlangeni, A morning after (UmlindeloUmlindelo wamaKholwa) (2016). Silver gelatin print. 36 x 24 cm. Private collection.
Artist Sabelo Mlangeni Title A morning after (UmlindeloUmlindelo wamaKholwa) Date 2016 Materials Silver gelatin print Dimensions 36 x 24 cm Credit Private collection

b.1980, Driefontein

Sabelo Mlangeni’s photographs offer intimate insights into the lives of others. He takes as subject expressions of community – be it chosen or happenstance – from a poor, historically-white suburb in Johannesburg to migrant workers living in hostels, Christian Zionist church groups and inner-city street sweepers. A sense of Mlangeni’s affinity with the people he photographs is apparent in all his work; a sense of his being present in the photograph yet out of frame. His is not the lens of a voyeur, but rather one in close dialogue with those he pictures, wary of the tropes of poverty and otherness to which the documentary medium plays. Bongani Madondo writes that “Mlangeni is ill at ease with referring to his work as ‘art’, or to himself as a ‘photographer’, preferring instead the term ‘cameraman.’ It might be most accurate, though, to say that he is a street photographer in the most historical sense, the ultimate flâneur – to wit, an [Eugène] Atget of Johannesburg.” Each photograph is a tender reflection on selfhood and community, on what it is to be both a part and apart.

Cut across
Lucienne Bestall

Arranged alongside one another, four artworks from A4's Archive offer reflections on dividing lines. – June 7, 2024

Path page
Cut across
Lucienne Bestall
Arranged alongside one another, four artworks from A4’s Archive offer reflections on dividing lines. – June 7, 2024
Path page

Begin with bare equivalences –

Four works: all monotone, all cleaved by a line.

First impulse –

A landscape by David Goldblatt divided, as the genre demands, by the horizon into complementary halves.

(Being unframed, the photograph cannot be included. It remains present as a note tacked to the wall, beyond the limits of the blue tape.)

First artwork –

Almost landscape, almost portrait. A photograph halved by eclipsing white. The chromatic composition of Sabelo Mlangeni’s image echoes Goldblatt’s, yet the line, rather than describing the topology of a given place, serves only to obscure it.
Sabelo Mlangeni's monochrome photographic print 'A morning after (UmlindeloUmlindelo wamaKholwa)' shows two individuals standing on the ground.

Similarly obscured –

The material nature of Kyle Morland’s work, first mistaken as a photograph by Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, as an indexical image of a worn surface.

Another impulse –

To include such a photograph; to follow the error.

(Also unframed, this photograph joins Goldblatt’s on the far side of the blue tape.)

In truth –

Morland's work is a rubbing made of the unseen facets of a steel sculpture; a notation of what is otherwise invisible. The seam that runs across the darkness describes the intersections of different planes.

Then –

Another unseen space, twice divided by shadows. This, too, by Goldblatt. Like Hlatshwayo's photograph, emphasis is given to the texture of time as it is transcribed on surfaces. The chromatic composition inverts that of the landscape, further resisting easy simile with its two dividing lines.

Lastly –

A fabric assemblage by Gerda Scheepers recalls Mlangeni’s image in composition and concealment.

In the lower half of the work, which appears all incidental mark-making and abstraction, is an impression of a landscape arranged vertically.

The title of the work, Pondoland Pocket, ties the image to a place, inviting comparison with Goldblatt’s photograph of the Karoo.
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