Page 42 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

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Hanging on a Wire
Siona O’Connell, UP Arts
Sophia Klaase took photographs over a period of 15 years of life in Paulshoek, Namaqualand. In 2017,
a book on her photography and essays on poverty, marginalised communities and ways of living was published.
Together with co-editor Dr Rick Rohde of Edinburgh University, Senior Lecturer in UP Arts, Dr Siona O’Connell was awarded the 2017 National Institute
for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) non-fiction edited volume award for Hanging on a Wire: The Photographs of Sophia Klaase. The book foregrounds the extraordinary photographs taken by Sophia Klaase – ‘Vykie’ – of her small home village of Paulshoek in Namaqualand. Klaase’s images first came to O’Connell’s attention when she curated an exhibition of women photographers at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town in 2010 and realised the under- representation and paucity of acknowledgement of the work of black women photographers in South Africa.
After making contact with Professor Timm Hoffman
of the University of Cape Town’s Plant Conservation Unit (who has been involved with Paulshoek for more than 20 years), and Dr Rick Rohde of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Edinburgh who first introduced photography to a teenaged Klaase in 1998, O’Connell was shown the remarkable and substantial collection. It can be argued that Vykie, as she was known, was one of the very few, if not the only, black woman in South Africa to have photographed the daily life of the same rural space for over 15 years.
Together with Dr Rohde, O’Connell went on to curate the first solo exhibition of Klaase’s work at the District Six Museum in Cape Town in 2013 and the idea of a book emerged as a consequence. In 2017, Ottobein University in Westerville, Ohio, USA, hosted the exhibition which attracted significant interest and was included in a teaching programme.
The book, conceptualised as an interdisciplinary endeavour, privileges Klaase’s work as an entry point into attendant threads of the aesthetic, poverty,
land and ways of living in a corner of South Africa that appears to be forgotten. The images, in Klaase’s unapologetic and unique sense of the world, show lives of humanness in an inhospitable landscape. She photographed the daily grind and pleasures of life: portraits, landscapes and celebrations, as well as funerals.
Through her lens, the viewer is compelled to see that despite hardship, the lives of her subjects exhibit celebration as well as defiance. Klaase’s subjects confront the lens with a sense of purpose that challenges representations of who and what they are supposed to be. Her photographs reflect her innate sense of composition and appreciation of the subject, urging the viewer to see that ‘these lives matter’, offering a nuanced representation of the cultural and social practices of Paulshoek residents that counter any idea of her subjects – or indeed herself – as victim.
Klaase’s collection draws attention to South Africa’s rural poor. Because of Paulshoek’s legacy as a marginalised ‘coloured reserve’, its inhabitants can speak with authority about the lived and residual realities of apartheid. The village, consisting of about 100 households, battles with high unemployment, and those who work receive very low wages; alcohol and drug abuse is rife. Her images are often constructed as tableaux, posed and acted out as if the camera provides a stage for impromptu fantasies and playful inventions. They refer indirectly to the moderating influence
of the church, at one extreme, and the sporadic eruption of alcohol-fuelled violence, at the other. In an intensely personal manner, Klaase’s work facilitates an engagement with the South African past, through the lens of a young woman whose body bears the scars of this history.
Sophia Klaase’s untimely death at the age of 34, in 2017, is South Africa’s loss as well as a reminder of the long reach of our violent past. The NIHSS award money will be used in its entirety to support Klaase’s mother and to provide some much-needed assistance to the Paulshoek Primary School.