Photography is a boring medium. Advertising ruined it for all of us. And then along came assholes with digital cameras, whose lives are less interesting than Wolgang Tillmans, who thought we would like looking at pictures of their friends, their ceiling fans, the corner of their beds. No sense of design, of colour, of composition, of tone (and these terms can be applied conceptually as well as formally). In the words of my friend in Paris: Random Contemporary. It gets worse when the photographer has a social bent: Concerned Random Contemporary. Ew.

Svea Josephy's Twin Towns made me happy. It made me forget all the horror I'd seen. For starters, the images were exceptionally well planned and executed. Secondly, I got a free copy of the catalogue, so I'm obliged to write nice. And it managed to be interesting and political at the same town. Wow.

The basic premise of the show, as the title suggests, was to photograph towns in different places that are connected by their name. It sounds really simple, but the more you examine the prints, the more complicated it gets, to the point where the matchy matchy names are just a device to examine different social and economic realities. It throws up questions like why is Africa poor and Europe rich, what events allowed South Africa to be colonised. My favourite pair of images are the ones above, showing Hanover in Germany and Hanover Park in Cape Town, where two messy histories are shown: Hitler's Germany and the Afrikaner's South Africa.

What really draws one into the images however, is the amazing compositions and the perfect matching of compositions in the matching pairs. Lines and focal points are almost perfectly matched or mirrored in the images. And I'm sure it was no easy feat. This type of hook is so appealing in work, and it brought me back and back to reexamine each image, not even the Bell-Robert's fine wine could distract me.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, svea josephy