Photo Color Services
Photo Colour Services (PCS) takes its name from a redundant photography lab and is a series of international exhibitions, workshops, presentations and ultimately a publication. It began with the discovery of 481 photographic negatives in a disused lab in Johannesburg in 2007.
This exhibition at Ithuba gallery, although 8 years later, is a beginning for the project. Using the original branding, PCS has been reestablished as a research, rather than production lab. The show presents all 481 photographs, as they were found, in print development trays and invites the audience to explore and interrogate their possible meanings and narratives.
Alongside this a number of organisations and institutions in Johannesburg will work with this material during the exhibition and over the next year.
These are:
Market Photo Workshop
The Market Photo Workshop was founded in 1989 by world-renowned photographer David Goldblatt. He envisioned the workshop environment as a space to provide further education in visual literacy and photography practice to disadvantaged learners during the reign of the previous political regime.
I will work with staff, students and alumni in order to find out how some of these photographs were used. We will also attempt to locate some of the original photographers and people who worked at PCS.
Creative Writing Department. University of the Witwatersrand
Students in Creative Writing will collaborate with postgraduate students from the Wits School of Arts on a semester-long project that will incorporate image and text. Students will work in pairs and develop a single, collaborative project. The students will treat the photographs as a catalyst for the production of new creative writing.
WISER
Also based at Wits. Wiser is an interdisciplinary research institute in the humanities and social sciences. The institute draws on a history of advanced interdisciplinary research at Wits that dates back to the late 1960s, but over the last decade, in particular, it has pursued five main objectives. These are: to foster independent, critical inquiry into the complexities and paradoxes of change in South Africa; to conduct this enquiry by drawing intensively on comparative international research especially from the African continent; to foreground the global theoretical significance of WISER’s research agenda; to combine aesthetic and social scientific analyses; and to provide an institutional space that strengthens the scholarly dialogue between South African researchers and academics in the rest of the world.
Stuart Whipps. 2015
