Untitled

Artist Zwelethu Mthethwa South African, born 1960

Date2005

MediumGelatin-silver print

Dimensions17 1/2 x 22 in. (44.5 x 55.9 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LineGift of Allen G. Thomas Jr.

Object number2005.25.7

On View

Not on view

Label TextZwelethu Mthethwa’s photographs of post-apartheid South Africa present people living in poverty and on the margins of society with dignity and compassion. His images of people, their homes, and places of work are taken in the shantytowns that sprawl for miles on the outskirts of Cape Town, focusing on the emigrant workers who have left their rural homes to look for jobs in and around the city.

In this series of photographs, we see the interior spaces of makeshift barbershops located in the shantytowns, their walls papered with advertisements and hand painted catalogues of haircut styles. Made out of pieces of corrugated tin, scraps of wood and cloth, cardboard, posters, magazines, and newspapers, the shops are temporary, transient, precarious spaces. One image presents the recipients of haircuts in two different poses--one man is depicted with his hand over his face – perhaps hiding from the camera or caught, unknown to him, in a moment of despair or contemplation. The other man is looking downward, lost in his own thoughts.

Mthethwa’s portraits reference a long history of social realism and documentary photography, including Walker Evans’ photographs of sharecroppers in the South in the 1930s and Dorothea Lange’s portraits of migrant farm workers during the Depression. Like his historical predecessors, Mthethwa’s photographs give us a picture of a community, a window into a world that we might never have the opportunity to venture into, and his images of personal identity are humble, quiet, and reverent.
[L. Dougherty, 2006]

ProvenanceCreated South Africa, 2005; collection of the artist; [Jack Shainman Gallery, New York]; Allen G. Thomas Jr., Wilson, NC; given to NCMA, 2005.
Published References"New Acquisitions: Sculpture, Photography and Painting," Preview: The Magazine of the North Carolina Museum of Art (March/April 2006), discussed 6, illus. (b-w) 8.

Linda J. Dougherty and Kinsey Katchka, entry for Untitled, in North Carolina Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, rev. ed. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2010), 596, illus. 597.
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