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 WHO’S IN THE HUE?  

BY LUYANDA MPANGELE

​​Artists Neo I. Matloga, Singarum J. Moodley 

​South Africa during Apartheid was a time stained with the tears of bereft black mothers and fathers made absent by the weeks spent working in mining districts, seeing their families at most, only twice a year. During this era, black people were usually photographed running frantically from rubber bullets in smoke-filled streets. Their bloodied, bruised, and beaten bodies were captured in images that were distributed globally. Their pain was palpable exposed with no say in how the media depicted them. 

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Singarum J. Moodley, a former Indian shoe machinist living in Pietermaritzburg established a studio that stood as a cathartic outlet for the non-white’s plight. He not only captured the poor and working-class at their best, ‘baswenkile,’ his photography fully humanised them.
​​Kitty’s studio, as it was affectionately called, operated under the ever-present spectre of dread, mandated segregation, and police brutality that tried to enforce the erasure of black identity. The pictures he took there ensured that black people were seen in a way that celebrated and glamorised what the regime failed to appreciate. His images were a resistance to the historical authority that exclusively confined the black experience to that of suffering. Moodley’s subjects, smiling, posing, or dancing were immortalised through a lens that before then, didn't acknowledge their multi-layered existence.

The sentiment in Moodley's photographs has worked itself through years of oppression and resurfaces, almost five decades later, as the defiant ghost of revolution in Neo Matloga's new body of work. He collages black life in a deliberate and unapologetic way; he states: "The black experience is multi-layered, and my mission is to create art that reflects this."

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​Reference

MPANGELE, L. Uncovering the grey area
Mpangele, L., 2021. Uncovering the grey area. Something We Africans Got.
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MAPEDZAHAMA, V. AND KWANSAH-AIDOO, K.
Blackness as Burden? The Lived Experience of Black Africans in Australia
Mapedzahama, V. and Kwansah-Aidoo, K., 2017. Blackness as Burden? The Lived Experience of Black Africans in Australia. Ph.D. The University of Sydney & Swinburne University of Technology.

© Marta Herford, photo: Hans Schroeder