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Bystanders, 2008

Title: The day Thabo Mbekhi Resigned

Year: 2008

Size: image: 51 x 38 cm; paper: 59.7 x 41 cm

Medium: Photographic print on newsprint

Edition: 1/100 to 20/100

R 8 000.00

Bystanders (2008) is a series of extreme close-up portraits re-appropriated from South African newspaper archives. The portraits, taken with my Nokia cellular telephone, are of background characters caught in photographs reporting on historical events in South African history.

These marginal bystanders perform as a metaphor for the experience of seeing myself, as a young South African, in the background of a complex national history manifesting itself.

The haunting and lyrical portraits have a momentum mori quality bringing attention to the occasionally violent crop of the camera and the formal pixelated quality of the images, done intentionally as a means of breaking down an image into it smallest form, acts as an annotation of both surveillance and forensic photography.

conceptual photography, conceptual photography for sale, photography