Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [28]
My favourite is the mangled wreckage of a truck engine embedded in the sludge of a driedup irrigation pond, framed by grape vines shrivelled from the temperature rise none of the farmers wanted to believe in. It's the result of a car bomb set off by a bunch of right-wing students in Stellenbosch, who thought they could do a better job than government inc. with the drought and the superdemic. The only thing they managed to accomplish was blowing themselves up.
Apparently, engines are the only things that can survive an explosion of that calibre. In Lebanon in the 1970s, the photojourns were so jaded by all the car bombs, they turned it into a game to find the engines. Not that Mr. Muller was around then, but he describes the photo as a kind of tribute. This is the way his spiel runs every time he shows me his portfolio, like it's a recording and he just has to hit play. I think this is a side-effect of getting old.
The image is beautiful, almost black and white, although he shot in colour. It's the time of day and the way he's worked the light that washes it out. But it's the evocative simplicity of the context, of the meaning he's brought to a landscape that's impressive. It's easy to gutwrench with people: Tiananmen Square or Kevin Carter's vulture baby or the Bangladesh Children's War, but investing an inanimate object with the same quality is an accomplishment.
If I was still at Michaelis, I would make this the focus of my thesis, but I walked out of classes when dad died and didn't go back to explain, and now my bursary is null and void. Jonathan keeps nagging at me to reapply, to plead extenuating family circumstances.
Actually, I wanted to use some of Mr. Muller's images, from the quarantine series in particular, as a juxtaposition for an exhibition. But when I told him about it, planning a contrast between the photos of crams of people fighting through the smoke from the burning tyre-barricades and the hack gas versus the shots I took of the stadium crowds at the Extraordinaries concert last year (on assignment for a PR company), he told me it was pretentious art school crap, that it was totally insensitive to what people in this country had endured, and thank God I'd dropped out of that awful place.
'So what's it today?' Mr. Muller asks. 'No, wait, let me guess. Portraits of street kids holding their only possessions. Reflections in rear-view mirrors. Close-ups of people's shoes on the underway.' He's always amused by my choice of subject matter, although the street kid idea is genius.
'You'll just have to wait and see, Mr. M. I think you'll like them, though. I've been pushing the film.'
'And how go your plans for the exhibition? All in order, I trust?'
'We did the final selection yesterday. It's looking good, although Jonathan's a bit freaked out by the format, too archaic, the repro …'
'Yes, yes, you told me. It won't be perfect carbon copies.'
'Unless I scan them, which goes against the whole concept of non-digital.'
'You just stick with what you know. Ignore the whole bloody lot of them, especially that Jonathan. They're blowing smoke out their asses. You ready?'
We always do the developing together. I wish I could say it's a sacred rite of the alchemical process, a communion, but really it's because he doesn't quite trust me with his expensive chemicals. I'm also not allowed to address him as Dan or even Daniel. Just Mr. Muller, which is so retro.
I reach up to push aside the black plastic bags and he gently takes my arm, pushing up the sleeve. 'My goodness. What's this?' And suddenly I'm embarrassed.
He regards the glow logo seriously. 'When I was young, I wanted to get my grandfather's number from the prison camp tattooed on my arm. A sort of homage to suffering.'
'Why didn't you?'
'Jewish. It's not kosher. And it was in remarkably bad taste. I didn't realise that at the time.' He shrugs and