Kurgan, Terry 2013 PUBLIC ART PRIVATE

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PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

Terry Kurgan
Published online: 15 Mar 2013.
To cite this article: Terry Kurgan (2013) PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES, Cultural Studies,
27:3, 462-481, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.769729
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Terry Kurgan
PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES
This essay traces a body of work, as it emerges in the space between visual art and
an engagement in the public sphere. A range of projects and exhibitions, using
photography as medium, is described in the context of a discussion about the
complexity of the photographic transaction. All of these projects explore notions of
intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in
the South African public cultural domain. The essay focuses particularly on Hotel
Yeoville (2010), a participatory public art project-based online and in the
library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville’s estimated 40,000

inhabitants are largely disenfranchised migrants and refugees from every part of
the African continent. The project comprised a website and an exhibition space
with a series of digital, interactive booths in which members of the public were
invited to document themselves through mapping, video, photography, text and
social media applications. The essay reflects upon the performative, evocative and
expressive potentials of the media platforms that could be accessed through the
Hotel Yeoville installation and in this particular social and political context
asks questions about the photographic encounter and its relationship to self-
representation, truth, knowledge and power.
Keywords photography; performance; intimacy; participatory;

Johannesburg; migrants
There is a wonderful text that the great American photographer Richard

Avedon wrote in the late 1980s, called Borrowed Dogs (Avedon 1987), where he
reflects upon his own family photograph albums. He says that his family took
very great and detailed care with their snapshots. They dressed up; they posed
in front of expensive cars and homes that were not theirs. They borrowed
dogs. He recounts how in one year of family photographs he counted 11
completely different dogs. His family never in fact owned a dog! He talks
about the fact that in his family albums all the photographs revealed a lie about
who the Avedons really were, but a truth about who they really wanted to
be. When it comes to domestic snaps, this inherent paradox, and the many
questions around what kind of evidence they actually provide, has always
intrigued me.
With so many millions of people globally now armed with camera-
equipped cell phones and instantly uploading their images to Facebook and
Cultural Studies, 2013
Vol. 27, No. 3, 462481, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.769729
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
PUBLIC ART 463
Flickr, the commonplace snapshot is more than ever the genre of our times.
And with these images almost entirely framed by screens and social media
platforms, they are integral to the way in which we socialize and participate in
public life and are one of the primary ways in which we perform (and form)
our mobile and transmissible identities.
But it is the afterlife of these images that preoccupies me most their
relationship to temporality, memory and the meaning we make of our lives,
and the fact that they exist at the very threshold between private and public
space. These personal, utterly commonplace images have the power to
resonate in broader public and political spheres. For many years, my work has
included a diverse range of projects that draw attention to the complex social
and cultural meanings of the ordinary, everyday domestic snap.
My practice is characterized by a productive tension between the studio
and the public realm; between, on the one hand, making fixed objects and
installations for the discreet and private spaces of galleries and museums, and,
on the other hand, enlisting public participation in a collaborative art practice
that produces human interaction and social experiences. These projects have
ranged in scale from the domestic to the monumental and have been sited in
spaces as diverse as the gallery, a maternity hospital, a popular Johannesburg
shopping mall, an inner city public park and a prison. Neither model is posed
here as better. Rather, both should be viewed as part of a continuum of
concerns or obsessions linked by conceptual threads.
The strongest of these threads that bind as I oscillate between spaces is
related to another sort of private/public tension. It is focused on notions of
intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between what is considered to constitute
‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the public cultural domain. I have an enduring
faith in the importance of telling what seems to be domestic realm, very ‘little’
personal and intimate stories in the public realm because I am sure that these
stories must have repercussion in much broader social, political and moral
spheres, and can sometimes, quite unpredictably, produce exquisite moments
of recognition and communion of a very human kind.
In some of my projects, I am concerned with the convoluted stories of
familial relation that psychic inheritance that runs through families souring
or curing and that for the most part remains incapable of representation and
is, therefore, not ‘seen’. In others, I have been interested in working with
‘found’ domestic photographs, or with the street photographer’s oeuvre, as the
instruments for social probing. The latter are a vehicle for interrogating not
only the image itself but also established traditions of representation in a fairly
fractured and repressed contemporary South African context. The rigid
conventions they follow seem to bolster and reinforce dominant relational
myths and ideologies, which are often hard to live up to in reality. I am
interested in that impromptu performance of ‘self’ and in the negotiation that
takes place in the making of a photographic image; the mutual need and
desire of both photographer and subject for affirmation, recognition and
464 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
acknowledgement. It is a complex and largely unequal transaction filled with

vanity, fragility, love, desire and fear in all their many guises. Each subsequent
project grows directly out of the thing before, and I carry certain ideas and
subjective experiences along with me and try them out in relation to different
publics, contexts and social circumstances (Figure 1a and 1b).
The intimate work I’m the King of the Castle was produced in 1997 for Purity
and Danger, an exhibition on taboo in contemporary South Africa, curated by
artist Penny Siopis. Artists and public personalities were asked to consider
(in the halcyon and early days of a society undergoing enormous change)
notions of ‘good or bad’, ‘right or wrong’ and ‘decent and indecent’. In that
context, this work focused on the universally problematic terrain of
representation and child sexuality, but more importantly to me, on the taboo
realm of the representation of the eroticism and intimacy inherent to the
mother and child relationship. In less than half of the grid of 40 images, my
(then) six-year-old son was naked, which became controversial and the focus of
public response to the work. To my mind, they were quite ‘achy’ images of a
little boy performing himself for his mother, trying on different versions of
masculinity and of himself. Some people were disturbed by the work. Others
loved it. In retrospect, I think the disturbance has quite deep social roots.
FIGURE 1 I’m the King of the Castle, 1997, C-Prints, dimensions variable, (a) Installation
View, Gertrude Posel Gallery, Johannesburg; (b) Detail, Gertrude Posel Gallery, Johannes-
burg. Photo # Terry Kurgan.
PUBLIC ART 465
FIGURE 1 (Continued)
Marianne Hirsch, in the context of Immediate Family, a body of work by

photographer Sally Mann, writes about how usually, children have desires to
which mothers respond. In terms of accepted theory with regard to how
children acquire subjectivity, culture values a maternity that casts an enabling
and mirroring look at the child, supporting the child’s subject formation
(Hirsch 1997). The notion of mutual recognition and mutual and various forms
of desire (his imaged by the photographs and mine suggested by the fact that
I took them) is very threatening and unsettling. The controversial media
response was provocative. It stimulated extremely lively and public conversa-
tions, not only about representation but also about what constituted ‘good’ or
‘bad’ mothering!
In late 1997, following heated public debate, freedom of choice was
enshrined within South Africa’s Termination of Pregnancy Bill. During
extensive public parliamentary hearings, women’s bodies and the intimate
things that happen deep inside of them were exposed to the glare of an unusually
bright spotlight. The predictable tensions and publicity generated by the
abortion debate were useful for more reasons than their pro-choice outcome.
The open parliamentary process facilitated a public display that transgressed
deeply held and extremely repressive taboos surrounding motherhood, sexuality
and the private domain. It was at this time, in the context of the polarized
response to my work on Purity and Danger, and the increased subtlety and
complexity being forged in the relationship between the public and private realm
in South Africa, that Maternal Exposures1 (1999) evolved (Figure 2).
Maternal Exposures was permanently installed into the densely trafficked
antenatal waiting area of Mowbray Maternity Hospital in Cape Town. It was
designed to relate strongly to the function and the architecture of this public
hospital space, and it interacted with the public in whom the work originated.
The photographs and text derive from the interviews I conducted at the
FIGURE 2 Maternal Exposures, 1999, multi-media, Installation View, Mowbray Maternity

Hospital, Cape Town. Photo # Terry Kurgan.
PUBLIC ART 467
hospital over a period of six months; they were informal conversations with
women who had just given birth and were mostly in extremely open and
heightened emotional states of all shades and hues.
The text, at times provocative, poignant, irreverent, humorous, brave,
sexy, sad and challenging, alternates among the three principal languages of the
Western Cape; those being Afrikaans, English and Xhosa. It is extremely
visceral and intimate in tone. The text, and the red keywords layered over
alternating ghost images, is intended to speak to as well as to contradict the
so-called documentariness of the images. The work raises questions about
maternal ambivalence and photographic meaning, most particularly about the
ways in which photographs of women with children are conventionally ‘read’
(Figure 3a and 3b).
Lost and Found (2000) was one of a series of gallery exhibition projects in
which I worked with a combination of photographs that I shot, and archival,

family photographs (not always necessarily my own) that I found. The work
wove these images into a conversation about family affairs, love affairs and
photography itself. Most of the found images that comprise this installation are
from the 1960s. When my parents divorced in 1988, my mother, who was the
‘maker’ and ‘keeper’ of the family albums, took them with her. My father was
left with a box of disobedient photographs and transparencies that had never
FIGURE 3 (a) and (b) Lost and Found, 2000, digital prints onto silk organza, Installation
View, dimensions variable, Durban Art Gallery. Photo # Terry Kurgan.
FIGURE 3 (Continued)
quite made it into those albums. I used a selection of these, many of them
images of those in-between familial moments that do not confirm, ‘I promise
I love you!’ or ‘I am having a happy childhood!’ or ‘It’s a perfect day at the
beach!’.
It was my interest in working with found, domestic photographs and
their meanings that led me to working with the resident photographers in
Johannesburg’s inner city Joubert Park on The Joubert Park Project (2001)
and Park Pictures (2005). The park is the working environment of a large
community of street photographers, many of whom have spent their entire
working lives (and, in some cases that is upward of 20 years) operating from an
inviolably fixed working position. They and many of their customers have
their roots elsewhere. They have migrated to Johannesburg from other parts of
the country and the continent to find work and better lives. The position
each photographer occupies is sacred, and the right to occupy a particular
wrought iron bench, a large rock on the grass or a low wall perch along
a cobbled pathway, is often purchased or negotiated as far away from the
inner city of Johannesburg as a rural village in Mozambique or Zimbabwe
(Figure 4a and 4b).
Park Pictures comprises portraits and abbreviated life histories that I made
with each of the 40 photographers, a large aerial map of the park precinct
marking their fixed positions, and then finally, many hundreds of their
PUBLIC ART 469
FIGURE 4 (a) and (b) The Joubert Park Project, 2001, Installation Views, Joubert Park,
Johannesburg. Photo # Terry Kurgan.
commissioned photographs that had never been claimed by their clients.2
It was very intriguing to see the difference between whom they were
photographing 10, 15 years ago and whom they were photographing now.
In addition, this act of preservation was instructive. By holding onto
photographs in trust, as an extension of their daily recurring labour, these

photographers had inadvertently created an informal ‘social history’ archive
that documents the shifting demographics and transformation of this
fragmented city.
These projects marked the beginning of my interest in themes of migration
and had the most direct influence upon the genesis of my recent large-scale public
realm work, Hotel Yeoville, which is also discussed by Kerry Bystrom in her essay
‘Johannesburg Interiors: On Homes, Hotels and Hospitality’ in this volume.
Hotel Yeoville3 (20072010) was a participatory public art experiment that
explored the capacity of what Bystrom terms ‘acts of intimate exposure’ to
enable people to make human connections with others. It was a project
I directed and produced in close collaboration with a diverse cast of artists,
architects, social scientists, urban planners, community activists, local business
people and digital designers.4 Working in the shadow of a deadly seam of

xenophobia that runs through South African society, we wanted to understand
the realities of African immigrants and refugees who have come to South Africa
in great numbers post 1994. Our work took place in Yeoville; an old,
neglected suburb on the eastern edge of the inner city of Johannesburg.
Yeoville has always been a foothold for new migrants to the city and it now
hosts micro-communities from many other parts of the African continent.
Isolated and excluded from the formal economy and mainstream South African
society, their dominant engagement is with each other and with home in
faraway places.
The journey towards the project that became Hotel Yeoville, began on a
muggy, languid Johannesburg summer’s day in late 2007. I was on a shoot with
an urban planning colleague. He was researching a newly commissioned
Yeoville upgrade plan, and my job was to identify and photograph the blurred
and interesting boundaries between public and private space.
The diversity of the neighbourhood was immediately very striking a
mixture of South Africans and immigrants from countries such as Nigeria,
DRC, Ethiopia, Somalia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
I was interested in the intricacy of how it all seemed to work; the throbbing
street life and conditions on the high street a lively hub of new and old shop
fronts, bars, restaurants, Internet Cafes, and, in spite of Johannesburg City
authorities’ intervention, dense with street traders (Figure 5a and 5b).
While sitting on a bench in the shade outside Newnet Internet Café, we
chatted to Ginibel Mabih Forsuh who grew up in Limbe in the south-west
region of Cameroon. She had studied Business Science at the university, and
then in 2005, just graduated and 22 years old, followed her fiancé, who had
moved to Johannesburg a few years earlier. ‘Ce chien de menteur!’5 He had
taken up with somebody else in her absence, and so Ginibel found herself
stranded, in a foreign city, and needing to rely upon her own wits and
resources. Our conversation curved around a wistful turn from looking for
love to looking for work. Taking up a perch alongside us, Frank Assimbo,
PUBLIC ART 471
FIGURE 5 (a) Ginibel Forsuh Mabih and Frank Assimbo, outside the Newnet Internet Café,
2007; (b) Ginibel Forsuh Mabih, researcher and unknown respondent, Internet Café research
process, Yeoville, 2007. Photo # Terry Kurgan.
formerly a teacher of French literature and philosophy at the University of

Kinshasa, sifted through his folder of papers and pleasantly joined in on our
conversation. He had come to the store to photocopy his degrees for a teaching
job application he was making. In the interim, he told us, he was running
computer literacy classes from his apartment on Yeo Street. He introduced us
to some of his friends as they passed us by, and then we all drifted off to the
Afro-themed Nando’s on Fortesque Street, for a Coke.
Television and print media relentlessly direct our gaze towards the
violence and conflict between South Africans and Africans who have come here
from other parts of the continent. Seldom is the world of a successful
immigrant, with an ordinarily mundane and repetitive domestic life, reported
upon. The images of migrants and refugees that we are presented with are
usually abject and universalised types, standing in for oppression and (always
noble) suffering. They are, of course, integral to the representational politics

that surround mobility; symbols of a much bigger argument.
I started to think about making a project in Yeoville that responded to this
specific location, enabling representation of some quotidian common ground.
I wondered about finding ways to talk back to the abstract political story with
little, intimate stories about this particular person’s loss or that particular
person’s dreams or his great hairstyle, her exquisitely styled shoes and
enduring search for the perfect man!
After finding an institutional base6 and raising some seed project funding,
I gathered together a first project team. We conducted many site visits and
conversations to examine the spatial and social infrastructure of the neighbor-
hood. Two things caught our attention: the first was an entire suburban block of
wall space covered in bits and scraps of paper with handwritten community
notices, offering and seeking everything from accommodation, work and
romance to lounge suites, French lessons and beyond. The second was the
unusual density of Internet cafés we counted 30 cafés distributed between just
four blocks each offering a range of ancillary and hospitality services in
addition to time online.7 Between the outdoor communications wall and the
modus operandi of the many Internet cafes, we decided to employ the medium
of web technology as our medium and to design an interactive, customized
website aimed at the online, café culture of the suburb (Figure 6).
At the beginning of 2010, Hotel Yeoville was installed into the second floor
of the brand new public library, visible to and from the street, inside it’s
dedicated vitrine-like exhibition space. There it hung, elegantly suspended,
brightly coloured during the day, and lighting up at night with pink fluorescent
neons advertising the website address.
The framing concept for the design and development of the project was
our view of the political importance of the minutely observed details of
personal everyday life. We emphasized subjectivity and personal identity and
designed the project’s content and navigation through ‘normal’ everyday life
categories such as home, love and work. In order to market and popularize the
PUBLIC ART 473
FIGURE 6 Hotel Yeoville visitor adds his photo booth portrait and commentary to the photo
wall, 2010. Photo # Terry Kurgan.
web component so that it might have a life independent of the exhibition

venue, we transformed most of the virtual spaces of the website into a real-space
and real-time exhibition experience. Visitors could write about Johannesburg,
home, childhood, love, hopes, dreams and fears; map their roots and journeys
across Africa and beyond; generate a series of portrait photographs or make a
short movie. All the content created in our documentation and storytelling
booths went back to the website and intertwined with the resource content. The
resultant website content included migrant and refugee survival guides, online
discussion forums, classifieds and a very popular business-listing directory
(figures 7 and 8).
Enlisting human participation and working in the public sphere is neither
straightforward nor predictable. The inevitable negotiation with reality that
characterizes both public art processes and multiagency working meant that we
designed and were also designed by the process. Working collaboratively in the
public realm involves being able to build relationships of trust, and in good
faith, to navigate one’s way through a complex set of power relations and
negotiations between artists, other professionals, partners, funders, stake-
holders, residents, participants and audience that eventually animate and bring
the work into being. This shifting matrix of relationships forms the delicate
foundation onto which everything else is layered and is as much a part of
the final product as everything else that is produced along the way.
For just a few weeks short of a year, the project ran five days a week and
generated public engagement and unusual, extraordinary social experiences at
the same time as it produced a distinct and tangible body of work.
FIGURE 7 Hotel Yeoville visitor Megan Pillay makes a short movie for YouTube in the Video
Booth, 2010. Photo # Pedro Cunha.
FIGURE 8 Hotel Yeoville visitor prepares for his photo booth portrait, 2010. Photo
# Mark Lewis.
PUBLIC ART 475
In the context of a large group of people, who are often living below the
radar, the performative, evocative and expressive potentials of the popular
social media platforms which they could access on our website and computers,
like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, were particularly significant. On the one
hand, we were maximizing on their viral capacity (and the ease and familiarity
with which people in Internet cafes seemed to be using them), but more
importantly, we were counting on the fact that social media networks appear to
straddle both public and private spheres; they paradoxically encourage a private
and, often, intimate performance of one’s self to be delivered in what is
potentially an extremely public sphere. In the context of the frame and imagined
community of our project, using the language of these platforms enabled people
to safely ‘show themselves’ in a way that did not threaten their lives or residence
in the city, but at the same time boldly asserted their presence.
Hotel Yeoville was inserted into a community whose agency and social
capital are devalued by socio-economic, cultural and political factors. The
project offered ways to participate in the world by taking charge of your own
representation within the framework we had created. The upbeat and
performative images people made in our photo and video booths demonstrated
this most keenly. While this offline and online exhibitionism runs the risk of
being criticized as narcissistic display, it is my view that in this particular
context these images ended up affirming the unique condition of the
photograph. But, not in the usual, well-honed sense given to it by famous
theorists like Barthes and Sontag, speculating upon the unique melancholy of
the photographic image, of the photograph as a trace or sign of something or
someone that is no longer there, but rather, in this context, the ‘picture’
serves to testify that this particular person is here now, claiming space,
asserting identity and possibly, even citizenship (figures 9 and 10).
In her groundbreaking book, The Civil Contract of Photography (2008),
Ariella Azoulay theorizes what she considers to be the innate relationship
between photography and citizenship in situations where human rights are
infringed and suffering is politically induced. She argues, in this context, for
photographs as a space of political relations, and for a civil contract to
be enacted between all the participants in the act of photography, the
photographer, the photographic subject and all the users of photography
including and especially, spectators and displayers. She foregrounds the
importance of the agency of the subject in the photograph as well as the need
for spectators to ask themselves what the subject in the photograph is asking of
them. ‘Why are these men, women, children and families looking at me?’ asks
Azoulay (2008, p. 16) of the photographs of Palestinians exposed to the rule of
Israeli occupation that she sees in her daily Israeli newspapers. We might very
well ask this question of all of those who took photos of themselves in Hotel
Yeoville’s photo booth. Who were they looking at? And who are they looking
at now? Do they see a civil space in which the makers of the project, other
FIGURE 9 Hotel Yeoville Photo Booth Portraits, 2010. Photo # Hotel Yeoville Project.
PUBLIC ART 477
FIGURE 10 A Hotel Yeoville visitor’s photo booth strip and note, posted to the project
photo wall, 2010. Photo # Hotel Yeoville Project.
FIGURE 11 Hotel Yeoville Photo Booth Portrait, 2010. Photo # Hotel Yeoville Project.
PUBLIC ART 479
photographed subjects and the viewers of these share an interest? A recognition

of their personhood, their presence, and their identity? Perhaps.
While the subjects are very definitely addressing an imagined viewer, they
are also addressing themselves. Performing their very best selves for the
platform of our project but also for the familiar platform of the social media
networks their images will be uploaded to. The photographed person assumes
the existence of a viewer and knows within the frame of our project that there is
an actual and a virtual community exchanging glances out there too. Hotel
Yeoville engaged contingent communities of desire, many private desires that
congregated, recognized and for the most part complied with each other. And
photography was not an end in itself, but the necessary pretext for something
else to occur: the camera was a trigger, a facilitator for a most particular
interaction, a protagonist whose presence is one of the main subjects of the
photograph itself. This is best expressed by a message, one of so many hundreds,

left behind in bold black permanent marker, with a series of photographs, posted
to our physical and virtual walls (figures 1114). It reads:
‘Hello People! I AM HERE! I am Jean-Pierre from DRC and they call me
JP! This is me, or something I can tell YOU about ME, at any rate! JP a.k.a
Lover Boy . . .’.
Notes
1 The title of this work, Maternal Exposures is borrowed from a chapter title in
Marianne Hirsch’s 1997 publication as cited above, Family Frames: photography,
narrative and postmemory.
2 The photographers agreed to let me buy a large number of these unclaimed
shots to use in my work, as if I were the missing client.
3 Some of the material in this section of this chapter is drawn from, and
discussed at greater length in my chapter: ‘Public Art/Private Lives: AKA
Hotel Yeoville’, Kurgan (2013).
4 I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of the following
people: Research: John Spiropoulos, George Lebone, Ginibel Forsuh Mabih,
Michael Onyeneto, Raphael Bope, Siphiwe Zwane, Jason Hobbs, Andre
Graaf. Website Development: Jason Hobbs, Belinda Blignault, John
Spiropoulous, Andre Graaf, Greg Ilchenko, Richard Stupart. Exhibition
Design and Production: Tegan Bristow, Alexander Opper and Amir Livneh of
Notion Architects, Guylain Melki. Facilitators: Godfrey Tshis Talabulu,
Brittany Wheeler, Raphael Bope, Sian Miranda Singh OFaolin.
5 French to English translation: ‘This lying dog!’
6 The project was based at the African Centre for Migration and Society
(ACMS), a post graduate programme run out of the department of
Humanities at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
PUBLIC ART 481
7 Competition has driven the hourly rate for time online to a very low R5.00.
In order to make ends meet, Café owners offer a wide range of business and
hospitality services, from telephony to CV design, to food.
Notes on Contributor
Terry Kurgan is an artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. She runs an
active studio and public sphere practise, working across a broad range of media
from drawing, printmaking and photography to enlisting public participation in
a practice that produces human interaction and social experiences. Domestic
photography, and the complexity of the photographic interaction itself, is a
central theme in her practice. Kurgan received a BAFA from the California
School of Arts in San Francisco and an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine
Art, University of Cape Town. She has been awarded numerous grants and
prizes, and has exhibited and published broadly in South Africa and
internationally. Her Hotel Yeoville project was shortlisted for the 2012
International Award for Excellence in Public Art (IAPA). Recent exhibitions
include, Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the V & A
Museum, London (2011), and Still, life at Gallery AOP, Johannesburg (2011).
Recent publications include ‘Park Pictures’ in Unfixed: Photography and
Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art, Jap Sam Books, Amsterdam,
2012, and her book Hotel Yeoville, published by Fourthwall Books, Johannes-
burg, will be launched in February 2013. For more information about her
work, visit her website: http://www.terrykurgan.com.
References
Avedon, R. (1987) ‘Borrowed dogs’, Grand Street, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 52 64.
Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, New York, Zone Books.
Azoulay, A. (2009) On her book The Civil Contract of Photography, [online]
Rorotoko Cutting Edge Intellectual Interviews. Available at: http://
rorotoko.com/interview/20090123_azoulay_ariella_book_civil_contract_
photography (accessed 2 May 2012).
Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press.
Kurgan, T. (2013) ‘Public Art/Private Lives: AKA Hotel Yeoville’, in Hotel
Yeoville, ed. T. Kurgan, Johannesburg, Fourthwall Books, pp. 29 64.

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This article was downloaded by: [Tufts University]

On: 16 October 2014, At: 12:55

PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.769729

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville’s estimated 40,000

Keywords photography; performance; intimacy; participatory;

There is a wonderful text that the great American photographer Richard

acknowledgement. It is a complex and largely unequal transaction filled with

Marianne Hirsch, in the context of Immediate Family, a body of work by

FIGURE 2 Maternal Exposures, 1999, multi-media, Installation View, Mowbray Maternity

which I worked with a combination of photographs that I shot, and archival,

photographs in trust, as an extension of their daily recurring labour, these

people and digital designers.4 Working in the shadow of a deadly seam of

formerly a teacher of French literature and philosophy at the University of

noble) suffering. They are, of course, integral to the representational politics

web component so that it might have a life independent of the exhibition

photographed subjects and the viewers of these share an interest? A recognition

photograph itself. This is best expressed by a message, one of so many hundreds,

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