The art of memory

Lisa King is one of five Joburg women selected to participate in a unique project that aims to promote the talents of unpublished photographers around the world. She tells Oliver Roberts how her idea came from a childhood flashback

Childhood images have a funny way of lurking in the subconscious, awaiting their moment until, in adulthood, they seep into consciousness and reveal things that had previously been hidden.

So when Lisa King decided to get into her car and make the long, long drive to Ghanzi, a dusty town in western Botswana, right on the edge of the Kalahari, the loop in her mind came full circle. She had been to Ghanzi before, on a camping trip with her family when she was eight. They were on their way back from Botswana but didn't make the border in time. So they stopped in Ghanzi and camped on the side of the road.

"It's a really indelible memory," she says. "We had family photos taken under the 'Ghanzi' sign and I remember seeing donkeys walking through the town. When you're eight, that's quite enigmatic. It totally captured my imagination, and that's essentially where all my self-initiated work comes from."

King is one of five Joburg women selected to be part of POV Female Johannesburg, a photographic point-of-view concept introduced in 2011 by London-based Damien Poulain.

The idea is to have five unpublished female photographers shoot a subject of their choosing, and then have the work promoted through the publication of their first monograph.

London was the original city, followed by Tokyo in 2012. Next year's city is Buenos Aires, then New York.

Since its inception, the project has been widely acclaimed and continues to draw great attention from the art and photography world. The other Johannesburg POV photographers are Tracy Edser, Nadine Hutton, Nontsikelelo Veleko and Alexia Webster. Each monograph is limited to a print run of 100 copies.

King's original idea was to document the whole of Ghanzi, to photograph the rhythms and sorrows of its people. But then, on her third trip to the place, she attended an agricultural fair and that became the focus.

For such a small place, Ghanzi has a complicated history that involves Boer migrations, British prospecting, mining magnates and commercial farming. As a consequence, Ghanzi's population of 15000 is a mix of San, Boer, British, Herero and Motswana cultures. King's images extol and examine this to a sometimes uncomfortable degree. For although King says the community is pretty well assimilated, her images simmer with the subjects' uncertainties about their standing in this tiny, bleak world. It's in the body language, in the split-second dioramas which show that human beings from different backgrounds are often very unsure of how to behave around the other.

"I think disturbance is not a bad thing at all," says King. Fittingly, she has the work of Diane Arbus pinned up on a board in her study. "People don't like to be confronted with the human condition in a way that makes them uncomfortable."

There are some startling and beautiful images too: a zig-zag of tyre tracks left by a bus transporting prisoners; a half-empty polystyrene food container on a grandstand; a lone table placed under a small, uninhabited marquee, its white lace tablecloth lying limp in the still air. Restrained references to the nature of absence.

"There's presence, but there's not; I love that," King says. "The attraction at the fair was the entertainment but I was drawn to the peripherals. I'm interested in the sensory perception around inanimate objects. Part of when images become powerful is when they don't shout at you."

King shot all her images on a Hasselblad 500 film camera. She insists on doing things old-school, but is by no means a hipster with a pose. Film is simply more cerebral. "Analogue makes you slow down and consider," she says. She is currently working on a project about the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange.

In King's Ghanzi images, her deliberation is glaringly apparent. Aided by weeks and weeks of immersion in a place and its people, and the coincidence of light and gesture and absence, King has retrieved her girlhood recollections and turned them into pictures.

• The monographs of all five POV Johannesburg photographers are available from Fourthwall Books at 44 Stanley Avenue, Milpark. For more information on the project, visit http://oodee.net