Alot of Sabelo Mlangeni's home and work life is framed by a window. He lives in the former dining room of a building designed 105 years ago by architect Herbert Baker. The dining room has been subdivided into small apartments and one side of his apartment is a wall of plywood, with wood panelling on the other side.
Outside the window is Lilian Ngoyi Street, in the heart of Johannesburg's inner city, with its hooting taxis, blaring music and people everywhere, a buzz that starts at 4.30am.
It's at this window that Mlangeni has sat intermittently for four years, clicking away with his camera. "In one position," he stresses. He has watched the city wake up and go to sleep, small groups of security guards stopping people and demanding to see their identification, and — until they seemingly changed their route about a year ago — an open-top busload of tourists doing their own clicking away at the exotic sights below their reach.
No wonder Mlangeni is toying with the idea of moving to Hillbrow. Maybe it's time for a new window, to add fresh images to his Big City project; pictures taken while standing in the streets, which he exhibited in Germany last year.
He is now finalising Big City for a book. Not surprisingly, the publisher he is negotiating with is a top-end German one which specialises in books by international designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and other illustrious artists.CREATIVE OUTPUT
Mlangeni lives in one world but the output of his creativity is largely seen in others.
Even Umlindelo wamaKholwa, an exhibition about Zionist church communities in Southern Africa, which opens at the Wits Art Museum on June 26, is a reincarnation of Kholwa: The Longing for Belonging, which opened a year ago at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Cambridge historian Joel Cabrita had a lot to do with that; Cabrita's book on the American origins of the African Zionist churches is being published this year and she has been instrumental in securing the WAM showing.
Mlangeni has exhibited in Auckland, New Zealand, and his My Storie series about people in Bertrams, Johannesburg, premiered at the Liverpool Biennial in 2012. In 2014 he did a solo show with the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna entitled Postapart/heid Communities, and has shown his work in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Munich and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.POPULAR OVERSEAS
Ask Mlangeni why he is so popular overseas, and he giggles. It's a reaction which helps makes interacting with him so comfortable. He says he "can't deny" that the opportunities came from the gallery that used to represent him. "They are very powerful overseas and being part of their stable is one thing that created this," he says, adding: "We divorced in 2015."
However, their current relationship isn't bad because he will be exhibiting work created during his Lubumbashi residency for the gallery's 15th anniversary.
Mlangeni has built up a reputation as a documentary photographer, but he doesn't walk around with a camera taking pictures all day. Instead, he creates what the curator of Umlindelo wamaKholwa, Kabelo Malatsie, refers to in the exhibition's catalogue as "immersive" pictures: he either is or becomes part of communities for long periods. He lived in George Goch hostel, in the east of Johannesburg, for a few months for his Men Only series; he spent six years photographing the gay male community of his hometown of Driefontein and other rural towns such as Bethal and Ermelo for Country Girls; and the Zionist show consists of pictures taken between 1997, the year he took his first photograph, and this year."The intimacy that develops from these immersive experiences is visible in Mlangeni's photographs, where the people photographed are aware of the camera and trust the photographer," writes Malatsie.
Mlangeni says: "I don't walk into a community having a certain idea. I go deep into it."
Mlangeni grew up as a member of a Zionist church, the largest popular religious movement in South Africa, but has had two "disconnects", as he calls them. The first was when he was a teenager and preferred soccer to church. Then he would either be denied the traditional seven colours Sunday lunch or be given a beating. His second disconnect, in 2007, was for undisclosed reasons. These days, however, he finds the religion "spiritually fulfilling" and he is more than likely to be at church in the eastern parts of the city in his light-blue uniform today. "I think of them as the other family I found here in the city."
He says he missed the Zionist church when he left it because he loves its spirituality, its culture, its openness to allowing those other than the pastor to address the community, with some permitting celebrations of the ancestors. Also the music, the core of the church's programme, whose effect lingers long after the service.
He doesn't see the exhibition as a documentation, more a sharing, an opening up to discussion of the intimacy of the community, inside and outside the church. "I am thinking of the waiting, because it is in the waiting that communities are formed."
He has not focused on one particular Zionist church or on South African ones.
He says it is only autobiographical in the sense that he has taken an attitude towards the church, questioning it in ways that were never allowed when he grew up. "It starts to become my story when I start to ask questions ... as I grew older I started to think about my relationship with the church and I think that's when the work starts to become personal."When he started photographing church members, it was because people asked for a portrait and paid him R10 in return. By the time he had contemplated staging an exhibition, he had also toyed with the concept of being born again.
Mlangeni is not rigid as a photographer or a person; he is playful. When I ask how old he is, he laughs and says he is 16 (he is 38). When having his photo taken, he volunteers to keep turning his head towards the photographer. "I will look here and there," he says. Later he adds: "I forget: the camera can be violent."
He loves his eight residences, six in Europe, because they took him "out of my comfort zone". He also loves life in the inner city: "Just by opening the window, suddenly all the noise comes in. And when you walk out in the streets, you just disappear into the masses." His parting words echo his enthusiasm: "Don't you want to come live in the city?"
• Umlindelo wamaKholwa (Night Vigil of the Believers) is at the Wits Arts Museum from June 26 to October 28...