Reflections of a future foretold in Yeoville

Intimate Portraits Gideon Mendel captured the evolving essence of SA's first mixed suburb

Twenty-five years after he first exhibited his Living in Yeoville series, photographer Gideon Mendel's portrait of the intimate spaces of his neighbourhood still resonates with audiences, perhaps even more so because the passage of time has added a layer of significance to the images that couldn't be appreciated at the time.

In the late 1980s Mendel was a young photographer working for news agency AFP covering political violence during the dying days of the PW Botha era. Speaking from the UK, where he now lives, Mendel said that this experience "affected me deeply. I was seeing death and violence daily and so I think I began to take photos of the park near my house as a means of dealing with that."

With the increased crackdown on press freedom, and stringent penalties for the publication of political images during the state of emergency, what had started for Mendel as a side project to help maintain a semblance of sanity morphed into a full-time project for which he secured funding from the CityLab Market Theatre Gallery.

Yeoville, in which he lived, was one of Johannesburg's oldest and most cosmopolitan suburbs "with its own identity, unlike any other 'white' suburb that I know", wrote Mendel. It was Yeoville on the cusp of becoming the legendary melting pot of black and white in the period from the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 to the elections of 1994.

The photos reflect this - highlighting the still often tense interactions between black and white residents in this densely populated area as it became desegregated. Mendel's lens captured all the various ordinary, mundane aspects of the place in which he lived, moving beyond his original focus on Yeoville Park to the streets, nightclubs and alleyways of the suburb.

Mendel said that his desire to document the tensions in the everyday goings-on around him was inspired in part by David Goldblatt's In Boksburg, which had looked at life in the East Rand town. When considered in that light, the Yeoville series works as an intimate, acutely observed view of the other side of life in 1980s South Africa: urban, urgent, unable to pretend that sweeping change is not fast upon it.

Looking back at the work today, Mendel feels that what he captured was "a place where things were changing very quickly in a way that foresaw the way things would change for the country as a whole".

The exhibition was well received when it was first shown at the Market Theatre in 1988, with critic John van Zyl declaring it "so good, it is difficult to write about it. One simply wants to say 'Go and see it!' Look at every picture carefully and then go and look at Yeoville. See how the photographs explain Yeoville. Understand how they have skinned your eyes."

When he was asked to include the series for the blockbuster Rise and Fall of Apartheid exhibition, Mendel seized the opportunity to re-engage with the project through contemporary eyes. He pored over every image in the 344 rolls of film he had originally shot to produce video work that intrigued the visitors to Museum Africa.

Although he's moved on to work on projects such as those about the effects of HIV and global warming on communities around the world, Mendel hopes that the reconfigured Yeoville piece "will stand on its own as something interesting and unique in the world of South African video art."

Combined with music by The Dynamics, the piece, in the opinion of Gallery MOMO owner and curator Monna Mokoena, "transports the viewer back to the moments documented, and their subject matter speaks volumes about the milieu".

For some, Yeoville might be a place that has changed too much to be reconciled with the suburb they loved. It is now a pan-African space, full of people from around the continent. But Mendel is not nostalgic about his old stamping ground, seeing its current incarnation as a logical continuation of its cosmopolitan, transitory tendency to serve as a reflection of the country as a whole.

Living in Yeoville Revisited opens at Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, on Thursday and runs until November 24.