8/ F E A T U R E S T H I S D AY T U E S D AY M AY 1 1 2 0 0 4

Experience the SA 2010 bid announcement live at Vodaworld on May 15 2004. Catch Malaika, Trompies, Arno Carstens, Takalani Sesame and other celebrities live. Free entry for the whole family. Gates open at 9am. To celebrate this momentous occasion Vodacom will be giving away one new Bafana Bafana jersey a day for a week to fi ve lucky THISDAY readers. To be a winner, simply answer this easy question: “Where can you celebrate the 2010 bid announcement and meet your favourite Bafana Bafana star?”SMS your answer to 32811 (SMSs are charged at a premium rate of R1 per SMS)

Vodacom proud supporter of the SA 2010 bid. Yebo Yes!

TD15400

WALKING through the Goodman Gallery to catch the last few days of the Ranjith Kally exhibition it seems incon-ceivable that a

photographer of this stature and talent — who has captured a time, place and a people with such unerring sensi-tivity — could’ve been overlooked for so long. Or that he is having his fi rst exhibition almost as he becomes an octogenarian.

Kally’s exhibition Retrospective: 60 Years in Black and White is as much the result of his talent, as it is the product of the passion felt by curator, Riason Naidoo. An artist himself, Naidoo met Kally during a chance meeting at the Durban Art Gallery in 1998. “He said he had these nice photographs, so we ar-ranged to meet and he brought them in one of those big bags immigrants use,” says Naidoo. “I looked at them and I was blown away.”

“Blown away” is one way of de-scribing the feelings evoked by Kally’s photographs. Naidoo says Kally is unknown in part because he is not one of the brash young generation for whom self-promotion is as natural as breathing — a skill that Naidoo says comes from privilege, which is some-thing that Kally lacked.

“I don’t think he knew how to put together an exhibition, where to go, who to see and what an exhibition entailed. He needed someone to pull it together.”

Th at someone turned out to be Naidoo, who sees the Kally exhibition as part of the greater political project of reclamation and reconciliation. For Naidoo it is also signifi cant that the ex-hibition was curated from the inside, by someone who grew up in the world depicted in Kally’s photographs.

“Often these kinds of exhibitions are curated from the outside, by an inter-national curator who has the skills. So it becomes an act of appropriation, and that’s why it was an important exhibition for me to curate, to curate from within.”

For Naidoo, the quest to curate Kally’s work was personal and political. His father’s family had a stall at the Indian market in Durban for more than 50 years and, as a child, he would hang out at the market with his father and uncles, listening to stories.

“I would hear about gangsters, fi ghts and soccer clubs. But I had never seen this reality refl ected in South African popular culture and I wondered about this. So I was motivated to get the al-ternative history exposed.

“One of the things that apartheid did was to [make black] lives worthless, it took away meaning and importance, so people couldn’t even evaluate their own lives and importance. Self-reali-sation was denied to them. And what this [exhibition] does is to acknowledge that life. Th is doesn’t just apply to the Indian community, but to the broader black community too.”

Kally’s photographs animate a reality, especially of Indian life, that has gone unacknowledged for too long. Kally’s

photographs refl ect an “alternative re-ality” says Naidoo, one that debunks many myths about Indians, such as the stereotype that all Indians are middle-class, or that all Indians are spiritual.

Many of Kally’s photographs were taken in an informal settlement, long since demolished, called Tin Town, where the squalor and struggle speak of a hardscrabble existence most people would not associate with the Indian community.

He documents the heterodox reality of the Indian community, from the poverty of Tin Town to the passion of the Natal Indian Congress and the bluesy heat of Durban’s famous Goodwill Lounge, owned by the im-pressario Pumpy Naidoo. Kally’s lens also captured the absurdity of the apartheid project: a portrait of golfer Papwa Sewgolum barred from the clubhouse because of his skin colour, drinking tea in his car during a game against Gary Player; Syrub Singh and his wife Rose Bloom on the day they defended themselves against charges of immorality for marrying across the colour bar; an intimate portrait of Miriam Makeba and her fi rst husband Sonny Pillay taken in Kally’s fl at.

“I always knew these things hap-pened,” says Naidoo. “But what these photographs do is to give substance and legitimacy to the stories I’ve heard. It proves that they were not fabricated. He was the main photographer of that era and has the best photographs.”

Home Before the Storm, a photograph of two young girls rushing home, is the

one image in the exhibition that tests the boundaries of credulity most. Its composition and Kally’s skill in capturing the preternatural sky make it almost impossible to believe that he received no formal training in photography. Or that he was almost completely unknown, even in his hometown of Durban.

A chance meeting between two South African artists has resulted in an exhibi-

tion that was long overdue. For Naidoo, the meeting with Kally has shifted his focus: he started researching Kally as a photographer but has since moved to explore Indian identity in Durban in the 1950s.

“Th e motivation for me is that I’m an artist as well. Kally comes from a generation that was deprived of op-portunities and you can see from his ability that there is a wealth of material

there. Th at is history, his pictures tell a story of that time. I was motivated by the desire to see someone get recogni-tion before it was too late. It’s an old story and I was in a position to make it happen.”

Ranjith Kally’s exhibition Retrospec-tive: 60 Years in Black and White runs until tomorrow at the Goodman Gallery in Parkwood, Johannesburg

Two generations of South African artists came

together to produce the Goodman’s current

exhibition; one was photographer Ranjith Kally,

the other was artist Riason Naidoo. GAIL SMITH

spoke to Naidoo about the images that have

remained obscured for so many years

Lens on a hidden history

GIVING SUBSTANCE TO STORIES: Clockwise from top, ‘Home Before a Storm’, 1946, children run for cover as a storm looms over the Umgeni River; ‘No room at the clubhouse’, 1963, Papwa Sewgolum drinks tea in his car during match against Gary Player; Jazz legend ‘Tony Scott at Pumpy’s Goodwill Lounge’, 1957; ‘Love Across the Colour Bar’, 1962, Syrub Singh and Rose Bloom defy the Immorality Act; Miriam Makeba and fi rst husband, Sonny Pillay, share an intimate moment, 1959; and ‘Washing Dishes’, late-60s and 70s life in Tin Town.

T h i s D a y KThisDay Cyan ThisDay Magenta ThisDay Yellow051104_td_008_JHB 051104_td_008_JHB 051104_td_008_JHB 051104_td_008_JHB