Past Perfect

Past Perfect (2008 - 2016), is a photographic series highlighting the pervasive and visual relationship of war and conflict within public museums. These images form a study on how this violent past is preserved and presented to society across the world.

History is ultimately a representation of the past, defined through a reconstruction of memory and objects. With their vast access to knowledge, museums have become our modern day cathedrals. However, they are not solely concerned with historic moments, but also with ideas; notions of what the world is, and how it should be framed. They play an important, and too often, unquestioned role in constructing ideologies and the interpretation of our identities.

Past Perfect highlights the ambiguous space occupied by museums as they negotiate and build meanings through the curation of artefacts and memory, where fact and fiction can fuse, and the harsh reality of conflict is simplified.

Working throughout Cuba, Egypt, Israel, UK, USA and Vietnam, I have focused on the infrastructure and artifice of these spaces, to bring a new perspective on how manufactured history and memory can be within the museum space.

Waiting

While living in Johannesburg, I was struck by the ever-present reality of people waiting. Inactive yet expectant, this condition becomes a visual echo of the predicament that many South Africans can find themselves in. Though many wait alone, the amount of people waiting becomes a collective, city-wide experience.

Visually I was drawn to those seeking shelter from the harsh summer sun by positioning themselves in the shade. Figures here occupy ephemeral spaces of respite created by the surrounding urban environment. These shadows remove the individuals’ identities, leaving only the subtlety of posture and the details of place. With only the waiting period accompanying each image, the purpose or possible outcomes of these situations is unclear. We are left to meditate on the temporality of these individual situations and the indirect connections that waiting creates across society.

You can purchase the book of the work here There is also a website for the work that features a collection of new texts that explore the theme of waiting, in South Africa and elsewhere. You can read these as well as updates on the project here

Platinum

This series uses the four month strikes and subsequent massacre of thirty four miners in Marikana during 2012, as its starting point. These resulting images are focused in on the physical and political landscape of South Africa’s platinum mining communities. Through mobilisation the political environment through out these mining communities has changed dramatically since the massacre. Yet formal mining institutions have yet to make any serious adjustments to the lives of thousands of families who live and work in an environment dominated by the infrastructure of power.

You can purchase the mini-publication 'Platinum' that includes four large format posters and an essay by Jack Shenker titled 'Marikana', here.

Ascension, A Useless Island

A barren and volcanic island isolated in the middle of the vast Atlantic Ocean, Ascension laid untouched for centuries until its landscape was dramatically altered for survival through experimentation with its ecology.

The series explores the results of this experimentation, which scientists’ have labeled as 'the evolution of ecology in fast forward'. The experiments were initiated by a handful of desperate British marines in the early 19th century to increase the islands sparse rainfall. They shipped in and planted flora from the four corners of the world, and soon, blooming sustainable vegetation on the seemingly sterile volcanic island became the marines’ main focus.

Since the age of Darwin, science had believed that evolution takes millennia. Yet, Ascension shows fascinating proof to the contrary, offering the world evidence of an ecology that has developed into a working system in little more than two hundred years. Amazingly little scientific research has been carried out on this natural anomaly, ignoring potentially important research about the speed in which this cloud forest has matured in such a short time.

The human interference in the development of Ascension's natural environment creates a landscape that is familiar in its content but unfamiliar in its order. An uneasy sense of displacement hangs in this manufactured terrain.

Tension is drawn out in these surroundings where the conflicting tendencies of man and nature exist in both order and disorder.

Cairo Divided

From a population of one million at the beginning of the 20th Century to over 18 million today, Cairo’s expansion has been rapid. Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament to both its remarkable centripetal power and surrounding vacuum of opportunity.

For centuries, Cairo’s growth has been checked by geography, bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. Now, faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments – Utopia, Dreamland, Palm Hills, Belle Ville and The Egypt of My Desires. Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert, where it can be built from scratch.

Drawn in to these vast spaces, and surrounded by the drone of construction, I was mesmerised by the exposed layers of new urban centers being developed among the desert dunes. In focusing on these landscapes I wanted to capture the reality of fantasy lifestyles in mid-production, to document the extravagance of a few whose wealth put sharp focus on the fact that 40% of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day.

The surreal remodeling of the landscape shows little appreciation for the environment it is rapidly colonising. From the decisions of a few, Cairo is morphing its periphery into its core whilst condemning the previous centre to a life on the margins. I felt witness to a mass exit strategy taking shape, and with the camera, recorded the foundations of abandonment in pursuit of self-interest and exclusive isolation.