{"id":84637,"date":"2016-12-29T10:47:40","date_gmt":"2016-12-29T08:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/a-year-of-reading-writing-and-consuming-photographs-as-snapshots-of-stories-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2016-12-29T10:47:40","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T08:47:40","slug":"a-year-of-reading-writing-and-consuming-photographs-as-snapshots-of-stories-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/a-year-of-reading-writing-and-consuming-photographs-as-snapshots-of-stories-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"A year of reading, writing and consuming photographs as snapshots of stories | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year of reading, writing and consuming photographs as snapshots of stories<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Activists, New York City Pride Parade (2016)<\/span> Roddy Roye\/Instagram<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Review 2016<\/strong>: As a writer of political non-fiction, my interests tend to revolve around race, class and gender. I pay attention to human rights and governance questions, and keep my finger on what is happening in South Africa and the US because those are two countries I have lived and worked in for many years. I spent the early part of this year finishing my first book \u2013 a memoir about growing up in exile.<\/em><\/p>\n

To cope with the long hours spent writing and editing, I often needed to take my eyes off print. Scrolling through social media was often one way of alleviating the stress, but this brought its own anxieties about procrastination.<\/em><\/p>\n

So I sought out photographers. I made a conscious effort to consume images \u2013 because really what are images if not snapshots of stories presented visually? So my choices for my most important cultural encounters of 2016 reflect my turn to photography, my focus on the world outside South Africa, as well as my continuing need to read fiction to inspire my own non-fiction writing.<\/em><\/p>\n

1. The Lowland \u2013 Jhumpa Lahiri (2014)<\/h2>\n
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Cover of The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Lowland is about the relationship between two brothers who grow up in the marshy lowland of Calcutta. One chooses politics and the other academia.<\/p>\n

It is the story of a family rent in two by political violence. The Lowland is about India\u2019s loss \u2013 about the haemorrhaging of a nation that can\u2019t fulfil the promises of independence. Lahiri is a lyrical and subtle writer \u2013 the prose in this book carries you away. <\/p>\n

And yet she is much more than that. Lahiri is an observer of loss \u2013 one of the finest writers out there whose work focuses on human sadness. The Lowland is a work of fiction but for writers of literary non-fiction (like myself) Lahiri\u2019s mastery of the craft of writing offers profound inspiration. <\/p>\n

2. Citizen: An American Lyric – Claudia Rankine (2014)<\/h2>\n
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The cover of \u2018Citizen\u2019 by Claudia Rankine.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the course of 2015 and 2016, Claudia Rankine wrote a number of lengthy pieces about Serena Williams. <\/p>\n

Each article found a way to both pay homage to the athlete and to reflect on what she means to America \u2013 a country that has always had difficulty respecting women and black people and has seldom known what to do with unapologetic black women.<\/p>\n

So I had been wanting to read Rankine\u2019s book-length poem Citizen for some time. As race relations heated up at home in South Africa and in the US, and as the very idea that black lives matter begaan to lose its urgency and devolve into a philosophical debate \u2013 the focal point of an acrimonious new argument about the role and place of identity politics in a globalised world \u2013 I was curious about what Rankine had to say. <\/p>\n

As the New Yorker noted in a 2014 review: <\/p>\n

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Citizen begins by recounting, in the second person, a string of racist incidents experienced by Rankine and friends of hers, the kind of insidious did-that-really-just-happen affronts that startle in the moment and later expand, poisonously, in the mind. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The accumulated power of micro-aggressions; the second-guessing of the self \u2013 all of this is unrelenting. Rankine saves us from the endlessness of racism though. <\/p>\n

The cataloguing of the pettiness of racism confirms its largeness. It also affirms the humanity of those of us who \u2013 like Rankine \u2013 have lived through millions of moments that are designed to pull us down.<\/p>\n

3. Ruddy Roye (Sept 16 \u2013 Oct 29, 2016; Stephen Kasher Gallery, New York)<\/h2>\n

While I was in New York for a meeting in late September, a friend who covers the arts and culture scene for the Village Voice took me to see a number of shows. By far the most powerful was an exhibition of Jamaican photographer Radcliffe \u201cRuddy\u201d Roye\u2018s photographs. It featured 20 large-scale photographs, many taken in Roye\u2019s neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and his longer-term and larger project called When Living is a Protest. <\/p>\n

Roye has become a phenomenon on Instagram, which does not detract from his seriousness as a photographer. To the contrary. The accessibility of his photos and the fact of his 250,000 followers provides him with an important platform. This in a time when images of black protest are so often edited, altered and made to conform to standard tropes about rage and rioting.<\/p>\n

As Roye notes:<\/p>\n

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The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people\u2019s faces \u2014 forming a real and active dialogue about these issues. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n