BETWEEN DARKNESS AND LIGHT. A Mid-Career Retrospective of the Photography of Jodi Bieber. At Iziko National gallery until November 19. LUCINDA JOLLY reviews.
“WE all have two sides, one dark and the other light,’’ says photographer Jodi Bieber, who is probably best known for her iconic photograph of the 19-year old Afghan woman Bibi Aisha with the severed ears and nose.
An act perpetrated by her husband and brother in law after she was sentenced by a Taliban village court for running away from a brutal marriage of compensation – an exchange for a killing committed by her family five years ago. The story has, if not a happy ending, a tolerable one. Miraculously Aisha survived - has since had reconstructive surgery and become an international spokesperson. And Bieber went on to win the 2010 World Press Photo award with Time magazine featuring the photograph on its cover.
In an interview with the photographer, Bieber explains that her approach to photographing Aisha was to shift the stereotype of Aisha as a victim. In keeping with this, although Bieber reveals Aisha’s severed nose, she choose to conceal mutilated ears behind her headscarf. And during the course of the photographic session she asked Aisha to “give her the sense of who she is and the strength of who she is”.
Interestingly, Bieber says that at the time of taking the photograph “I was insecure after I took the photograph and I phoned the writer of the accompanying article to say I thought the editor would hate it”. Bieber’s extensive mid- career retrospective exhibition Between Darkness and Light is made up of eight bodies of photographic essays taken between 1994 and 2010.
It features women who have murdered their husbands because of abuse, gangsters of Westbury, illegal immigrants, HIV and Aids in Spain, women survivors of domestic violence, the beauty of women, and Soweto. What has remained with Bieber is not the technical aspects such as shutter speed and light settings, but the experience. And more importantly, that within the darkness of any situation there is always the element of light. It is this that informs the exhibitions title and provides its fundamental thrust.
There’s been a shift in the works spanning the 16 something years from the darkness that populated her earlier images, a leftover approach from her time as a press photographer where briefs were given and the darker side of life was shown, to choosing her own projects and being a fly on the wall to more involvement. In a video interview Bieber reflects on this shift as twofold. “One’s psychology can only take so much”. One is reminded of what happened to the Franco-Brazilian social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado who became psychically and physically ill from the effects of photographing Rwanda’s genocide.
Bieber’s debriefing took the shape of living in Paris and London for five years where she could go to cafes, and although the South African context was “still with me”, she “didn’t live it”. ‘There’s also Biebers arguable belief that although South Africa has its post -apartheid problems, she says that it feels “much calmer, much more sorted”.
She says “there’s a lightness” which is apparent in her current images. She provided an example using a photograph- which has watercolour softness unusual in her photographs – of hydrangea blooms in a cut down plastic bottle from the Soweto series. .
Taken in an old age home, many viewing this exhibition were drawn to this particular image. Interestingly Bieber tells me that there’s a print on the wall behind her bed. She describes the photograph as “a symbolic photograph of home and speaks about pride and creativity”. It’s also an indication of where she is photographically.
Before photographing the series Wolves and D0ogs she says, “I would never have seen that photo. l’d probably just have taken a dark photo of an old person on their own or neglected not necessarily in an old an age home”. Bieber’s original training was a nine week photography workshop at The Market Theatre before she started her career as a press photographer. Bieber is a bit of a lone wolf .
Although she references American editorial photographer Steve McCurry in her Bibi Aisha photograph, she generally does not refer to other photographs and didn’t have a mentor. “My style is my style” she says. In fact she is influenced less by photographers and more by “what I am feeling”. Ask her who she is inspired by and instead of a photographer, she says “those guys in Joburg that go through the litter, you see them walking for miles”. She feels that she was lucky not to have had internet or to have gone to university and glad that she learnt her practice by actually taking photographs.
Working as a press photographer gave her the ability to think on her feet both technically and psychologically. “One minute you are in a wealthy situation, next you are in a shack”, she adds. The challenge of taking a newspaper photograph lay in how to tell a story using one image. For Bieber the aesthetic and the content are equally important.
But she felt that the story she got was larger than what a newspaper could provide in terms of allocated time and space. Photography has taken over from paintings in terms of impact. Take Gericault’s the Raft of the Medusa, an icon of Romanticism which drew 40 000 viewers and highlighted “governmental negligence and corruption”. In the 19th century, photographs of the American civil war had a greater impact than drawings and woodcuts used in magazines.
The reality shown in Mathew Brady’s photographic documentation had a profound impact on the public’s romantic ideal of war. In terms of the cessation of the Vietnam war Professor Liam Kennedy of the UCD Clinton Institution for American studies points out in his piece on Photography and international conflict that the effects of photography on public opinion were incremental, as the flows of daily photographic coverage over the long term of the conflict slowly undermined military and political claims of a justifiable and winnable war.
In our own country, pictures of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and 1976 Soweto uprising, in particular Sam Nzima’s image of Hector Pieterson carrying a wounded school friend, alerted the world to the apartheid atrocities. The hardest project for Bieber in this exhibition was the video made of women who killed their partners. “I couldn’t look at that project for a long time”. It took an hour and a half to edit each interview, so that Bieber knew the words off by heart. “Even now I can’t listen to it, it was very, very difficult” she said.
Check out the powerful images that were part of the Spanish HIV project P ositive Lives. Instead of photographing in a Barcelona shelter Bieber chose a rubbish dump visited by 1000 people a day which she describes as “a big brother house on drugs or a Mad Max experience”. She is now looking to explore different approaches using imagery but not in a traditional sense and getting involved in video.
She is currently working on a collaborative project with award-winning writer Lauren Beukes around her book Broken Monsters. Beukes has asked 100 artists to create an original work on a page ripped out of her novel. The work will be auctioned for an NGO charity involving literature for kids called Bookdash.
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