Men are interesting too: Photography, crisis and the masculine

Abstract

This article, in part, tries to introduce some of the difficulties in writing about the realm of ‘represented’ or ‘representational’ masculinity that I have faced in my own limited research on the representation of men in South African art and media. My encounter of visualised masculinities is briefly sketched in the hope that having this backstory will add depth and texture to my analysis of the ways in which ‘South African masculinity’ might have been communicated to or be ‘read’ by the viewers of the Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography exhibition held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2011. This exhibition is specifically chosen as the subject of this article as an example of the representational construction of South African-ness by South Africans but curated with a predominantly non-South African viewer in mind. A photographic exhibition seems a helpful site to talk about the importance of the representational realm since photography seems intuitively geared towards selecting and amplifying subject matter which, on a collective level, is thought to be curios, worthy of attention or interesting. As a photographic exhibition, Figures & Fictions is also balanced between the genre of ‘documentary’ with all the associations of objectivity, activism and agenda this brings with it and the critique of these connotations typically embedded in postmodern photographic art. Photographic art has been at the forefront of exposing a sort of masculine crisis and for this reason too forms the focal point of this essay. Throughout I return to Susan Sontag's conception of ‘the interesting’ as tool for unpacking whether the representation of men specifically is interesting and what exactly this might mean.

Keywords:

• Crisis
• Figures & Fictions
• masculinity
• photography
• South Africa
• Susan Sontag