The Young Shall Grow.
Rain falls ever so gently. There is a warmth to it that enlivens the young man quietly meandering his way home. The night hours of revelry , of loudly blasted music, of raised voices vying to be heard, still pierce his ears as he wanders the quiet streets of the neighborhood. Warm, blanketed bodies rolling this way and that prior to waking up-the start of a new day. The young man reaches home and eases himself quietly through the back door.
Each of Musa Nxumalo's images is replete with such anecdotes from nights spent wandering various Johannesburg neighborhoods. They are intensely personal images, so intimate they often cut to the core of what it means to be young and growing up in the post-industrial urban confusion of twenty - first-century South Africa.
Johannesburg, a city still divided into neighborhoods of social inclusion and exclusion. Fences, walls, and security warnings draw the fine lines between privilege and the hard scrabble for survival. Shopping malls are clear marketplacesof this delineation. Some are built and located exclusively; others are accessible to the broad masses, with huge car parks accommodating private vehicles as well as the ubiquitous minibuses. This is very much the everyday scene in Johannesburg.
Weekdays of commune and commerce, of school and college, create a metropolitan vibe that aspires to the status of a world-class city. Indirectly, subtly, Nxumalo's images speak of these currents infusing the everyday. The interminable sadness of night-time Emdeni in Soweto, the darkness enveloping the low-lying roofs that don't quite hide the remnants of past social separation and exploitation. Homes, tiny spaces fraught with tension and the asphyxiating knots of religious belief. Hymns sung to the rhythm of nearby mine shafts dug deep into the High Veld. The church organ whines as the congregation files out, and a few hours later, they queue into buses headed for distant domestic jobs in affluent suburbs.
Immediate family, friends, and colleagues are all enmeshed in this subtle depiction of deprivation and unrelieved hope, tinged with the recent realignment of the political dispensation. The visibility of certain aspects of this is striking. Hairstyles are proudly worn: weaves, Afros, and the nakedness of razored scalps. Tattoos. Piercings. Clothes that signify and openly declare their brands. Sound systems blast tunes from all corners of the globe, an eclectic mix so vibrant that bodies sway in delirious shudders.
"Enjoy, sisters and brothers," is the insistent beat. Rather than a stopover, there are sleepovers. The clubs, the parties, the raves oscillate between the CBD of downtown Johannesburg and the neighborhoods of Newtown-once an infamous site of impoverished and exploited labor-and Melville, and Soweto. Increasingly, young people from different locales and differing economic situations co-mingle and party frenetically. Nxumalo is right there, poignantly capturing this ecstasy, this will to live and have an attitude, to be someone out there, searching, longing, becoming.
The camera a-tool of self-determination, of uncovering fleeting moments of time passing-particularly the fraught time between being young and what many term ' full adulthood.' This latter implies working for a living, and it also implies the gradual, almost imperceptible aging: the fine wrinkle lines, the sagging knees, and the sharp knife-like pain in the small of the back.
Nxumalo is not simply documenting family; he captures the body language of his mother, sister, niece, and other relatives. He is a participant, part of the constantly evolving drama and melodrama. This is also true in his images of In/Glorious. The title is paradigmatic, almost a-religious in its thrust away from glory, away from the possibility of redemption.
Torn Bible pages are so closely photographed that we somehow understand the underlying devotion, the foundational rock, the rock of ages upon which so many families built their endurance and fortitude. Their belief carried them through the desperate years in the wilderness.
But what of the Promised Land and of the young now coming of age? As often seen flashing by on West African highways, the proverbial saying, "the young shall grow," is transcribed onto interstate buses and coaches, the logo of the transport company. The inevitability of time, its contiguous forward march. So it is that the young grow and seek their own paths in the miasma of already laid down woven life threads. Nxumalo's camera is close-up, intimate, intuitive. His flash is used in the night hours to illuminate dark moments of despair, as with his sister leaning distractedly on a pole near the family car, or to illuminate moments of street bash in Emdeni, Soweto.
These are visual documents of a transitional time, of a gradual movement away from the home base of certainty-despite all the inherent conflict and strain- into a new world of inglorious uncertainty. At the end of the night, the faint light of morning dawns.
- Akinbode Akinbiyi, 2015