Out of Africa / "Guy Tallim" Edited by DaimlerChrystler AG, Berlin
By Zhanna Veyts
Guy Tillim, Edited by DaimlerChrystler AG, Berlin, 2004.
Documentary photography rides the fine line between journalism and art. In bridging the two into indissoluble images, it incites a perpetual dialogue, producing both empathy and distance in the viewer. Guy Tillim’s photography offers nuanced contribution to this discussion, as he documents the seemingly ever-conflict-driven Africa in images that burn in your retina long after you close the book’s cover.
Winner of the DaimlerChrystler award for South African Photography in 2004, Guy Tillim investigates the resounding tragedies that stain and scar Africa’s landscape and the faces of its people. Rather than portray snapshot moments, his pictures encapsulate entire histories of conflict. From beginning to end, the book reads like a travelogue of the life of a young child into a premature manhood. This journey parallels that of a society from colonial to post colonial identity. As noted in the introduction, Tillim’s "work stands as a record of rebellions duplicated worldwide, and the ensuing process of adaptation and transition that we know must necessarily follow if we are to survive, and indeed progress."
Each of the frontal portraits captures and leaves open the confounding question: are its subjects victims or perpetrators. Even the latter stand among the ruins as victims themselves, standing in for the individuals who once lived among what is now desolation. The anger intelligible on their faces and expressed by the frontality of their stances raises questions about the interrelationships of these people, and about who severed these relationships, questions reiterated by the deliberate absence of accompanying information to the photographs.
Tillim seamlessly blends aesthetic form and political content. The opening works of the book are filled with a sense of desolation, as evidenced by their selective lack of focus. Tillim sharply crops limbs and faces; these choices, while seemingly arbitrary, unnerve the viewer, and do not allow for disconnect from the juvenile subjects in the frame. The head-on gazes of the subjects burned into my memory the very first time that I saw them. Every image seemed punctured by the bullet holes in the walls. As I sought relief in the surroundings and backdrops of the landscape, I found more strife: The uneven horizons and the ceaseless sense of motion and dynamism are dizzying to the eye, unsettling to the intelligibility of the environments.
These photographs are powerful in their subversion of media’s often all-too-convenient polarizations. They do far more to complicate than they do to resolve. In the portraits of the then Zaire, now Congo, Mai Mai militia, Tillim forces confrontations with adolescence at its most cardinal state, and the result is as powerful as it is captivating. These images document glaring violence emerging from youthful innocence and invert the paradox put forth by Hans Blumberg in the accompanying essay: "It is an astonishing improbability that we live on earth and can see the stars, that the conditions of life do not exclude those of seeing, and visa versa…what a fragile balance between the necessary and the sublime." Tillim is uninterested in assisting hasty readers in their decisions and judgements. These confounding images send the viewer on an unceasing quest for visual resolution, a search for the hope we would find so comforting upon looking at devastations of villages and corruption of children. This sense of personal involvement reflects a successful communication of the perplexing questions of Tillim’s subjects into the viewers’ psyche; the sublimity of the collection lies in establishing this rooted and empathetic connection. Feeling thus prompted, the question changes from what has happened to what will the viewer do?
