Unbinding the Image

Momtaza Mehri

Legibility is a double-edged demand. We want things to make sense. We want the world to fit neatly into prefabricated framings, into digestible categories that are easy to identify and isolate. We must be able to first understand before we can relate. Relatability becomes a bear trap, obscuring differences and forcing others to contort themselves into a shape more deserving of our empathy. To be legible is to be seen, the first steps on that rocky path towards being humanised. Like all conditional arrangements, our attachment to legibility favours the powerful and burdens the disempowered. Everywhere, human suffering is enabled because the victims involved are considered too alien, too unfamiliar, too illegible.

Translation can be a willing embrace of failure. In moving between languages and registers, there is ample room for the opaque and untranslatable. Missteps and misinterpretations are to be expected, and the translator knows that it’s impossible to hold meaning captive. Language runs away from you. It slips out of your hands. Translation, at its most luminous, welcomes friction. It accepts the thorniness of difference. In the world of images, conveying a perspective can also carry with it the responsibility of the mediator.

The city has a way of swallowing up the individual into its frantic rhythms. It grinds the contemporary subject under its heel. Note the clamour, the frantic hustle. Men rush to catch a train. One climbs onboard, launching himself into the carriage. Others remain perched on the platform, waiting expectedly, their hats obscuring their eyes. This was how South African photographer Ernest Cole captured the arduous daily commutes made by black workers. “Train Comes In”, a photograph taken in 1965, is a daze of action. It transfixes a scene, portraying an entire national economy driven by exploited black labour. Apartheid-era South Africa relied on workers ferried in from its townships and hinterlands, clinging off the sides of trains like “clothes hanging on a wash”, as Cole described it. They were the backbone of the country’s rapidly expanding and modernising cities. Facing an international audience that was growingly unsettled by the apartheid regime, Cole sought to depict what he saw all around him. He was caught in a web of translation.

A pioneering image-maker and the first black freelance photographer in South Africa, the Transvaal-born Ernest Cole was a child when apartheid was institutionalised in 1948. He came of age under its repressive policies, which varied according to the racial category an individual belonged to. As an ambitious young photographer, Cole’s movements were bitterly restricted, frustrating his ability to capture broad spectrums of society. To evade these limits, he anglicised his name — Kole became Cole — and straightened his hair. This was enough to fool the Race Classification Board, and Cole’s  newfound “Coloured” designation granted him entry into spaces where no black people could enter. Fuelled by this act of creative subterfuge, Cole took his camera everywhere. His images, sometimes taken at great risk, unseamed South Africa’s underbelly, peering into villages, slums, shebeens, bars, and bedrooms. Rupture was a persistent thread. Like so many others, Cole’s family had been expelled from their homes in the 1950’s, leaving behind their freehold township of Eersterust where it was possible for black people to own land. Such forcible relocations derailed the lives of a generation of upwardly mobile black South Africans, throwing many into poverty and despair. Exile left its mark early, fracturing Cole’s childhood.

How does one convey the orderliness of bureaucratised cruelty? How do you translate the fatigue and the fury? Photography was one way to reclaim some solidity for communities and ways of life systematically torn apart and reorganised by the apartheid regime. Again and again, Cole revisits these scenes. Precariously balanced workers clinging to trains. Commuters huddled together on overcrowded sections of railway platforms, their white counterparts standing leisurely in the emptier sections. Youth hitching rides between carriages, cheek to chest. Segregated bridges and signs. These photographs hum with activity, providing a visual commentary for the onlooker. Cole intended to blast open the silence surrounding apartheid, and the starkness of the image has an immediate effect. They can be seen in his 1967 book House of Bondage, the only major publication of his lifetime, which was subsequently banned in South Africa for its unvarnished honesty. These photographs are blistering indictments of a people’s stunted dreams. Produced under severe political constraints, resolve permeates and complicates these images. Consider the hushed moments. Droplets of sweat resting on a school child’s face as he concentrates. Stolen glances between dancers. The tentative stances of newly recruited miners. Life, punctured but not defined by violence.

Our emphasis on resilience as an unalloyed virtue can be suffocating. Resilience can become a crutch, stretching our tolerance of suffering. We learn to expect it from the downtrodden, celebrating their capacity to remain steadfast and patient despite the odds. Injustice is naturalised, and resilience fuels a back-patting brand of complacency. The resilience of others can fuel our own parasitic need for redemption, a source of renewing hope, the silver lining in the smog. We want the burden to be borne well. Image-making is haunted by these desires. Can photography portray devastation without seeking absolution? Can the image accommodate the abject, in all its quotidian guises? How do you translate the pain of a people without dishonouring or exploiting them? Advocacy has a visual vernacular, and it’s important to take note of its limits. This is a struggle also faced by the translator who must accept the inevitable loss that characterises their practice, as well as the weight of the untranslatable and unrelatable. Awkward frictions and substitutions abound. The subject strikes back. Walter Benjamin noted the long-standing conflict between fidelity and freedom in translation, a process that insisted on “boundless trust”. The poet Paul Valéry was sure that “fidelity to meaning alone” was a kind of betrayal. The answer may be somewhere in between, to be found in the lags and languishes, in the gap between what an image succeeds in conveying and what it can’t possibly express.

In 1966, Cole left the “living hell” of South Africa, convincing authorities that he was a Catholic pilgrim heading to Lourdes. He would never return. The following year, House of Bondage was published in New York, where Cole arrived, landing in an America convulsed by urban riots and polarised politics. Harlem was the centre of gravity, and Cole’s street photography captured its lively residents. From dandies to rambunctious children, political rallies to musical performances, Cole was attentive to the commons. His images are compellingly universal. The subway rattles, bridging the gap between Sophiatown and Harlem, between exile and refuge, spectatorship and participation. Cole may have been an outsider, but his eye was that of a newcomer intimately familiar with banishment. He knew what it meant to be a stranger in your own home. Upon seeing Cole’s photographs exhibited in London and Johannesburg, I am reminded of how he took these photos during a period of disorientation. He was learning about a place as he was capturing it, reflecting as he was translating. Photojournalism was a tool of reconciliation, helping him come to terms with what he had lost, as well as the newly forged connections and affinities he was encountering in the United States.

Ernest Cole didn’t want to be reduced to a “chronicler of misery, injustice, and callousness”, as he put it. He wanted his people’s struggles to gain worldwide recongition and for their situation to be changed. But he didn’t want them, or his own work, to be enveloped by the fog of oppression. His subjects may have been dignified, but they were also utterly ordinary. The archive he produced both before and after his exile reflects the unknowability of the individual, who retains their singular presence despite the difficulty of their circumstances. The “total man”, Cole wrote, “does not live by one experience”. The unmappable parts of our lives can’t be scaled down into submission. We will always exceed the frame. The translation, like the narrator, will always be unreliable.


 

Momtaza Mehri is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and winner of the 2019 Manchester Writing Prize. Her writing has featured in the GuardianPOETRYGrantaWasafiriBidoun, the White Review and on BBC Radio 4. She works across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education and radio. Bad Diaspora Poems is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.