Excerpt from JUST DO IT
SEAN O’TOOLE
In Camera Exhibition Catalogue (November 2008)
… one realises the extent to which South African photography has lapsed into dour formalism over the last few years, how morally constrained it is in its present tense, basically lacking in contingency and experiment, unwilling (unable?) to brave incompletion and failure. Otherwise put, and here I’ll strip all varnish off what I’m trying to say, if it is not a declaratory photograph that is clearly in focus and illustrative of some or other familiar and/or easily decipherable subject, then sure as shit it isn’t going to find a critical public. We want, it seems, to see what we already know. There are many reasons for this, some of them tied up in the complex history of abstract image making in this country, also its ambiguous public reception. In photography, though, this stifling rectitude is about more than just the contest between figuration and abstraction. Something else is at stake. Perhaps, and I venture this speculatively, it is the fear of using this most mechanical of arts to become unhinged, fucked-up, out there. True, negotiating the everyday is trauma enough locally, but ask yourself this: is social-realist photography the only way to evoke it? Where’s the chaos, the anguish, the intimacy, the love? Where’s the daring? Where is the evidence that a photographer is willing to fail, failure being the gateway to the new?
Am I making sense? Maybe it is time local criticism, like photography, stops making sense, that it too tempts failure. After all, and I say this explicitly within the context of Alexandra and David Ross’s allusive photographic projects, why mete out formalist criticism when the images demand a different sort of engagement. Which reminds me why I mentioned Markin’s museum [Art4u, Russia] in the first place. When the venue opened to the public last year, the organisers revealed a touching orthodoxy by publishing a catalogue. Its introduction was anything but conventional: “If anybody thinks he or she can draw a square better than Malevich, he can come on and fucking do it.” Now there’s a construction of words equal to the chaos of contemporary Russia.
Which leaves me with only one thing to say: if you think you can make a photo using a low-tech camera better than the Ross’s, go on, fucking do it.
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©Sean O’Toole 2008
Excerpt from DIALOGUE ON THE NUDE FEMALE FORM
MARY CORRIGALL
The Sunday Independent (February 2009)
Alexandra used a laptop camera to execute the photographs, which facilitates a level of intimacy that conventional photography is unable to achieve because it renders the author of these images obsolete – there is no witness. In this way the relationship that predominates becomes the one she has with herself and her own naked body. It is a vexed one influenced by the tradition of the female nude. Fittingly, Alexandra recalls the work of photographer Man Ray, his famous Violon d’Ingres (1924), (Ingre’s violin: a French idiom for “hobby”), in which the form is likened to a musical instrument, a plaything. Once again, Alexandra inverts the relationship; she becomes the object of her own gaze and enjoyment, and in showing poses of her back and derrière, she is able to discover parts of herself she is normally unable to view. In this way, the act of observing the nude becomes a journey of self-discovery rather than one of objectification.
This is an exquisite exhibition not only in a visual sense but in an intellectual one too. The siblings provide not only a striking counterpoint on the female nude but their intellectual and visual engagement with photography is also refreshing.
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marycorrigall2008pdf.pdf
©Mary Corrigall 2008
Excerpt from GAZED AND CONFUSED: SCENES OF PRIVATE LIFE
ANNA COWEN
In Camera Exhibition Catalogue (November 2008)
These two bodies of work by siblings artist Alexandra Ross and photographer David Ross that have human intimacy, male/female sexual relations and the female form as subject, were produced with no reference to or knowledge of the other. Each body of work comfortably stands alone. David’s sensual, melancholic and intimate work beckons the viewer into a daylit lovers’ world, a private yet familiar place. Alexandra’s erotic, playful and referential work, summons the viewer into a darker, more forbidden world of sexuality on display – a less sanctioned realm than a lovers’ retreat. These counter positions or binaries are the familiar territory of how we are accustomed to construct meaning: dark/light, night/day, illicit/celebrated, hidden/seen, playful/serious, ironic/nostalgic. Yet, whilst the differences between David and Alexandra’s work are manifold, it is their current proximity, their relationship in exhibition, which opens a dialogue that explores the tension that arises through their polarities and moreover, shifts the familiar critique of the Gaze into an interesting, and possibly radical place.
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annacowen2008.pdf
©Anna Cowen 2008
