In Conversation with Juan Orrantia

In Search of Decolonized Images of South Africa

Juan Orrantia is a Colombian photographer living in Johannesburg. He recently published the photobook Like Stains of Red Dirt. Salym Fayad is also Colombian and also works as a photographer in South Africa. For C&AL, the two countrymen sat down to talk about representation, independence processes and image subversion.

Juan Orrantia, Like Stains of Red Dirt, Dalpine 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

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by Salym Fayad

Mon 19 Oct, 2020

Salym Fayad: Your new book Like Stains of Red Dirt is different from your previous projects. After a number of photographic projects in different parts of Africa – like in Mozambique, where you took a reflective approach to the post-war period, or in the collaboration we did together in Guinea-Bissau, where we addressed the issue of memory and of the nostalgia embedded in dreams of independence – this new work seems to go in a different direction. This book takes an inward gaze; a very intimate and personal perspective composed by images of your house, your things and your family.

Juan Orrantia: In Like Stains of Red Dirt I approach my relationship with this particular place: with South Africa. And although the works in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique have another perspective, I feel that all these projects have something in common and that is the notion of representation. I want to talk about how to represent history in a post-war context, how to live out the memory of anti-colonial leaders and the effects of their struggle. And so my photography is guided by the question of how to capture that.

With respect to South Africa, I am talking about the place where I live my daily life and where I developed as a photographer. I have an intimate relationship with the place, which makes those questions more difficult to address. So I do it inside my own spaces; the book is filtered through my experience. This is not a book about a place, but from a place.

I perceive my relationship with South Africa as an accumulation of emotions, anxieties and frustrations crossed by historical and political currents. Consequently, the idea of how to represent this also implies the question of representation of the African continent. In my attempt to answer this question, I use color; as a reality, as a metaphor and as form. At the back of the book, I have titled miniatures of the photos with references. The point of this is not to dwell on formalities; rather, I want to indicate that the references – some clearer, others more abstract or personal – go beyond the photo itself.

Juan Orrantia, Like Stains of Red Dirt, Dalpine 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Salym Fayad, Car spinning. Courtesy of the artist.

SF: The photographic tradition in South Africa is closely linked to the documentation of Apartheid and its legacies. For many years, photography was used as a tool to denounce and expose daily life in a context of brutal oppression. The enormous archive that was created (Alf Kumalo, Santu Mofokeng, Gisèle Wulfsohn, Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, to name a few photographers) also left a legacy where the questioning of power dynamics in forms of representation is contained. The experience of having lived and worked in South Africa for over a decade influences our perception and how we practice photography.

JO: When talking about Africa outside the continent, there is an imagery that is still reminiscent of photos from National Geographic as well as other media from the 1980s. This imagery is surrounded by a discourse of the exotic. (In “How to write about Africa” Binyavanga Wainaina makes a satirical comment about the stereotypes with which the continent is represented.) Although we know that the photograph “lies”, that it is merely a perspective filtered by the subjective eye of a photographer, this idea of the exotic still persists.

In this sense, I suppose the most honest way to speak about South Africa is by dealing with these issues, that I have explored in other places, through my personal lens. Inhabiting this place while at the same time being an outsider is like being dislocated on some level.

When I alter or exaggerate colors, I hope to reveal this sacred little square, which is perceived as a window to reality. It is a matter of disrupting that conception, of subverting the meaning from the photograph itself. If before I was concerned with the question of how I represent something through photography, now, I am more interested in exploring how I can disarticulate or expound these representations.

Juan Orrantia, Like Stains of Red Dirt, Dalpine 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Salym Fayad, No title. Courtesy of the artist.

SF: When working on the continent one comes across multiple connections between the African countries and Colombia on different levels. The connection to the Afro-descendant population in Colombia is an obvious example. But the similarities between the two regions are also expressed in present-day social inequalities, historical trauma, or in the vinyl record trade that went in both directions between Latin America and Africa. Another example is the impact of the Cold War, which in Africa is linked to independence movements supported by Cuban military interventions and to solidarity processes in Angola or Guinea-Bissau for instance.

JO: Maybe that’s why we Latin Americans feel a natural affinity to moving in and relating to Africa: we come from a place with a difficult history and that was also colonized. But it’s also important to question this notion; how true is that idea? Where does that feeling come from? This is something I explore in our collaborations as well as in other projects through photomontage and through intervention of colonial images and archives. I do this from a personal, reflective and critical stance, not only of history but also of the role and form of the inherent visual arts.

There is a connection between the Cold War anti-colonial movements. Film and photography were part of an aesthetic of dialogue with anti-colonial discourse and accompanied this historical moment. I am very interested in this dialogue, both conceptually and formally for these projects.

Juan Orrantia, Like Stains of Red Dirt, Dalpine 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Salym Fayad, No title. Courtesy of the artist.

SF: Visual archives are often created and configured from the perspective of power. Modifying archive material to resignify the image is a way of ‘decolonizing’ the gaze, of disarticulating the mechanisms of representation.

JO: The idea is to emphasize the fact that an image is not the only version of a place but is also a response to the structures of the gaze.

Artists like Jo Ractliffe and Santu Mofokeng, for example, do so from their own experiences and stories. Ractliffe’s photos evoke traces, memories and silences from the conflict in Angola. Santu talked about concentration camps, the history of Apartheid, the townships, but from a poetic viewpoint through his personal experiences in these periods and spaces.

Another mechanism is the subversion of images. I try to take up ideas that link montage and film essay (for example Statues Also Die and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil) to African history and anti-colonial discourse. Therefore, I sometimes incorporate text into images or create digital collages; to shake up meanings from these stories, from their places and images.

The photo book by Juan Orrantia, Like Stains of Red Dirt, was published in 2020 by Dalpine. More information here.

Salym Fayad, like Juan Orrantia, is a Colombian photographer based in Johannesburg. Fayad also works as a reporter and over the past years he has organized events that aim to strengthen the cultural links between African and Latin American countries, such as the African film festival MUICA, among others.

Translation from Spanish by Zarifa Mohamad Petersen