Sabelo Mlangeni
Waking up each morning to a city swept clean of the previous day’s debris, Mlangeni set out to find the “ghosts who come while we’re asleep.” These ghosts, he found, are women municipal workers who begin their work after the city has emptied, picking up litter on near-abandoned streets. Photographed on film with slow shutter speeds, the street sweepers appear in Mlangeni’s photographs as apparitions in the dark, their reflective clothing illuminated by what little light there is. “For eight months, I followed these women,” Mlangeni says. “Some days, I would even leave my camera at home and just clean with them.” The resulting photographs make visible these unseen figures and articulate their vulnerability in the late-night inner city. Collected together under the title Invisible Women, Mlangeni’s black-and-white portraits offer lyrical reflections on their hidden labour.
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.