Photographing the zone of the “seam”: the Durban beachfront by Matt Kay

Abstract

This essay addresses the photographic series The Front by South African photographer Matt Kay. Produced between 2014–2015 within the context of a mentorship with David Goldblatt at the Market Photo Workshop, the series The Front engages with an emblematic South African photographic subject while searching for new visual vocabularies.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• photography
• born free
• David Goldblatt
• Matt Kay
• Durban

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) via the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) for generously providing funds for the PhD research on which this article is based on. I would like to thank the Market Photo Workshop archival and educational team for making their material available. I am deeply indebted to Matt Kay in particular, for generously taking time to meet me and provide in-depth insights into his training at the Market Photo Workshop and mentorship with David Goldblatt. I am grateful to Matt Kay, the David Goldblatt estate and Goodman Gallery for kindly allowing me to include this selection of images in the article. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to Dr. Kylie Thomas for providing helpful feedback on the finalization of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This article draws on research conducted for my book The Market Photo Workshop in South Africa and the ‘Born Free’ Generation: Remaking Histories (September 2024, Routledge).

2 Matt Kay, online interview by author, November 2018.

3 The definition of ‘the front’ comes from Oxford Dictionaries, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/front (accessed 10 December 2018).

4 Enwezor and Bester, eds., Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 33.

5 De Kock, Losing the Plot, 276.

6 My argument is in great debt to Andrew van der Vlies, who applied De Kock’s writing to South African photographic production in “Queer Knowledge”.

7 Viljoen, “Bang-Bang Has Been Good to Us.”

8 Ndebele, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary”; Enwezor and Bester; ibid, 32.

9 Kay, The Front, 17.

10 Ibid, note 2.

11 The qualifier “born frees” refers to the generation born shortly before or after the end of apartheid. In 2014, for the first time in the history of the country, people who did not experience apartheid first hand were at the age to vote. Contradictions between an assumption of freedom and everyday life difficulties have generated protests and counter-discourses in the public, educational and online domains.

12 Ibid, note 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Bonzon

Julie Bonzon, Ph.D. is an art historian and photography curator. Following a Masters in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2015), she completed an AHRC-funded Ph.D. in the History of Art at University College London (2020), specializing in South African photography. A book based on her research, titled The Market Photo Workshop in South Africa and the “Born Free” Generation: Remaking Histories was published by Routledge Photography in 2024. Bonzon has led curatorial and education projects at Magnum Photos, The Photographer’s Gallery, The Ian Parry Scholarship, The Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, and The Sharjah Architecture Triennial. She worked at the London gallery Messums as Director of Photography, setting up a new photography department representing international artists, and has since 2019 collaborated with private collectors alongside her curatorial activities. In 2020, she founded The Photographic Collective, an online platform featuring lens-based artists living and working in Africa.