After receiving his BFA from Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art while it was still a white’s-only  University, Zwelethu Mthethwa made a conscious decision to shoot South African black rural and township society in vibrant colour. While his contemporaries focused on gritty, often polarising black and white reportage, his Interiors series (1995-2005) broke down boundaries by depicting the disenfranchised victims of apartheid in their colourful homes, a dignified approach that humanised his sitters and brought the true nature of their living conditions to a global audience.

“It’s unfair to say that apartheid is gone. If you go to some areas where they don’t have real houses or real jobs, nothing has changed for them. I’d say that the major problem that faces us as South Africans is that we were never given space to talk about apartheid. And I think that because of that we are going to have to live with it for a very long time. There are a lot of people who don’t know about apartheid and how it affected other people. We haven’t been given the chance to talk and debate it. As an artist it’s my responsibility to bring it into focus. 

I started photography in the 90s and at the time South Africa was only documented in black and white. I would knock on people’s doors and ask if they wanted their photographs taken in their homes. And they would say, ‘Why? Our house doesn’t look nice.’ But I wanted to know why they thought that – their house looked good! I explained that I was trying to record a new history and then people would let me take the photographs. I would then go back and give them the photographs so they could see that as a document and also see themselves as a part of history. I was trying to confirm that they are real people. I was trying to bring humanity to them by saying that they’ve got a choice. 

In this photograph the red light comes from the plastic that’s on the roof. There’s no concrete roof, and it’s probably made of plastic because she ran out of corrugated iron. On the walls there’s corrugated cardboard that she’s put up to make it look much better. There’s no wardrobe space, so she uses the walls as a wardrobe. Her home is in better condition because there is electricity – but it’s illegal electricity that she has stolen from the main street lights. Everybody does it. It’s actually becoming very difficult for the government to imprison all those people, because they have a right to have electricity. 

In houses without electricity they use paraffin and candles. If one house catches fire then so will the next and then the next and so on. In the time frame of an hour they will all be alight. That happens all the time. In the summer without fail hundreds and hundreds of houses catch fire and burn down.

People here deserve better homes and better jobs. I wanted to show what people on the periphery are going through, that’s why I took these photographs. Most of the time we don’t know what’s going on. To take what they’re going through and put it in the public domain and make something that people can engage with, that’s my agenda.”

© TIM NOAKES 2010