Lost Highway

Dave Southwood spent four years photographing a stretch of the N1 between Cape Town and Beitbridge. The result is a striking interpretation of spaces and people lost and found, writes Oliver Roberts

The opening night of Dave Southwood's (pictured right) N1 photographic exhibition is typical of almost every art opening I've been to.

The place is laden with hipsters wearing Ray-Bans and colourful shoes. People are standing around with glasses of red wine, staring at the photos on the wall, pointing and pinching their lips. I even see one peculiar girl standing by a window, blowing on it and drawing shapes in her condensation: "Look at me, I'm, like, so creative."

I search the crowd for Southwood, trying to put a face to the magnificent photographs. Is that him? No, too short. Maybe that's him ... no, too trendy. In the end, he turns out to be the guy wearing the bright pink beanie. He gives a little speech and afterwards people flock to him, asking him about the photographs, all taken over four years along the N1 between Cape Town and Beitbridge.

When I meet him the next morning, I'm struck by how the photographs are so much like the man who took them - spare, complex and completely unpretentious.

"I think it's more a meditation on how to tell a story than about the road," he says of the project. "The road only appears twice in epic, spectacular form. Apart from that, it's got f**k all to do with the N1."

Cape Town-based Southwood developed the N1 idea by accident. While we discuss this, to make each other laugh, we use terms like "organically" and "this is how the project came into the world", because it's exactly this kind of bullsh*t that Southwood is trying to avoid in his examination of photography. In this way, he's very similar to one of his mentors, David Goldblatt.

"I was commuting to Joburg a lot for work. I had this medium-format camera, a Mamiya 7. It started off as an experiment in photographic space; I was trying to work out how flashing a subject in the foreground could tamper with the sense of space. This led to a sort of forensic work where I was just photographing objects. I was trying to work out what certain equipment could do, and develop a new style. I started to analyse what was along the N1 and went up to Beitbridge (on the Zimbabwe border) and took pictures of that stretch."

Because of the migrations, that part of the N1 is vastly different to the one between Cape Town and Jozi. There's desperation, the search for a place. Many of the people travelling along it, or simply sitting along its sides, are just happy to have a space to fill.

The photographs come with captions, written by Sean O'Toole. The difference here is that the captions are actually fictional. Southwood did not want the reality of the photograph to obscure its content.

"There's a branch of philosophy called phenomenology and it's about how the brain processes information before it becomes cognitive. That's what I wanted to do with these pics - make people register something in their senses before they understand the picture."

We talk some more. About photographers, about his dog Cressida, who travelled with him on the N1, and about the time he house-sat for Goldblatt. We talk about everything but the N1 project, with its lost spaces and people in limbo.

"I'm not bugged if what I've done is considered documentary or art. I couldn't give a f**k," he says.

"I'm just a big fan of everyday life, of photographing ordinary things. It's ... ubiquitous." Then he laughs again.

l The N1 exhibition is at the Goethe Institute until August 26, www.goethe.de To view more of Southwood's work: www.davesouthwood.com