ANGOLA - STREET VIEWS

BY GRAEME WILLIAMS

My work is housed in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian (USA) and Duke University (USA), The South African National Gallery and The University of Cape Town.

I have staged solo exhibitions in Johannesburg, New York, London and Paris and have contributed to many combined exhibitions on contemporary South African photography; including the 2011 Figures and Fictions exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the 2014 Apartheid and After exhibition at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.

During 2013 I was awarded the POPCAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography as well as the Ernest Cole Book Award.

Synopsis

Google Street View has become one of the most utilized sources of visual information and documentation in current day life. A mechanical camera records views of our planet’s streets at random moments in time. The views are snapped as they happen, with no consideration, for instance, of aesthetics or historical significance. Furthermore, the presence or absence of people within the frame is irrelevant. Google Street View provides us with a largely non-subjective document of our global village.

Doug Richard in his 2012 book, A New American Picture, makes a powerful statement about economic disparities and the neglect of certain segments of American society. His careful selection of screen fragments from the constant stream of dispassionate street views, produced a stark view of the social contrasts within his country. Richard’s anti-decisive moments are especially poignant because of the knowledge that the original source of these images (the Google camera), is both mechanical and perfunctory. His brilliant selection, in contrast, is extremely personal and subjective – the combination a creative and powerful comment on image-making and the state of his nation.

Angola, a large country on the south-west coast of Africa, also has vast disparities in wealth, but in contrast to America the majority of the population live in a state of dire poverty. Google has only captured a few streets within the richest waterfront areas of Luanda, the capital city. The sprawling slums remain undocumented. The lack of street view coverage of particular areas of the world highlights the degree to which social and economic disparities occur on a global scale; the Google street view coverage is influenced by the potential number of online users.

This essay, Angola: Street Views explores one of the overlooked corners of the world. Employing the pared-down aesthetic of the automated street camera as well as chance juxtapositions captured in Rickard’s book, these drive-by snapshots provide inescapable facts and insights into the neglected lives of many Angolans. The photographs were taken from a moving vehicle, resulting in accidental associations of people, vehicles and landscapes. The unstructured approach and loose framing results in images that resemble Google street views, however they lack any online functionality. Rather, their bland appearance, devoid of any postcard-type aesthetic, serves to communicate and amplify the social and economic poverty that pervades the city.

Images’ captions:
Angola – Street Views

AMERICA IN A TRANCE

BY NIKO J. KALLIANIOTIS

Niko J. Kallianiotis is a photographer and educator based in Pennsylvania. Originally from Greece, he started his career as a newspaper photographer, first as a freelancer at The Times Leader, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and then as a staff photographer at The Coshocton Tribune in Coshocton, Ohio, and The Watertown Daily Times in Watertown, New York. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Marywood University in Scranton, PA and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is also a contributing photographer for The New York Times.

Synopsis

In November of 1935 Walker Evans made a photograph about Bethlehem titled “A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania”. A large cement cross sits in the foreground overlooking a perfectly composed scene of American life and industry. A cemetery competes with brick homes and porches that are knitted together in a plateau, fluctuating between past and present. Just when your eye comprehends the few inches of greenery, you look up only to see a changing landscape of hard factory life. Like any brilliant photograph, it speaks in a dichotomy of quiet and busy; charging rapidly towards the future yet relentlessly becoming a prophecy of the uncertain. According to a 2009 article in the Morning Call, there were 350,000 people employed in the mill, 850 job trades and 35,000 people from the city of Bethlehem. Almost half of the population of the city worked at the mill. The mill closed and parts of it have been turned into a casino. The irony? When the casino was being build they could not find construction steel.

For America in a Trance, I’m exploring and respond as I travel through towns and cities across the state of Pennsylvania, a once prosperous and vibrant region where the notion of small town values and sustainable small businesses thrived under the sheltered wings of American Industry. A mode to promote American values, industrialism provided a place where immigrants from tattered European countries crossed the Atlantic for a better future. An immigrant and naturalized citizen myself, I had always perceived the U.S. differently, mostly from the big screen Hollywood experience and the adventures of “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man”.

This project is an ongoing observation of the fading American dream so typified in the northeastern Pennsylvania landscape but widespread across the United States. My subject choices derive from intuition and the desire to explore the unknown and rediscover the familiar. Through form, light, and color, I let the work develop organically, and become a commentary of place and also of self. The hues work as the constituent of hope, not doom. The work is a product of love, for both the state and country I have called home for the last two decades. While my interest is not in the depiction of desolation, at times it becomes necessary to the narrative. I search for images that reflect, question, and interpret life in the towns and cities across the Keystone State, and the yearning for survival and cultural perseverance. My interest is in the vernacular and the inconsequential, that which becomes metaphorical and a connotation to a personal visual anthology for the photographer as well as the viewer.