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Tales from the City of Gold. By Jason Larkin.
Kehrer Verlag, 2014.
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Reviewed by Adam Bell
Tales from the City of Gold
By Jason Larkin
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2014. 96 pp., 53 color and black & white illustrations, 9½x11".
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Shot entirely on 2 ¼ medium format color, the book combines landscapes and portraits. Often shot at a distance, Larkin takes a somewhat measured and restrained approach in documenting his subject. Figures are rarely brought to the foreground and are framed as part of the landscape. A man, identified as an environmentalist, overlooks a mining pit; two children play with toxic sand on a paved sidewalk; and in one of the book’s most iconic images, a lone man stands against a towering mound of tailings while dogs circle and roam throughout the space. Although not always the focus of individual images, the scarred landscape is an omnipresent focus — tailings loom in the background, rivers of chemical sludge snake through the sand and ambiguous trenches fragment the landscape. What at first appear to be mesas and banks of sedimentary deposits are quickly revealed to be the aftermath of the mines, which have left no part of the landscape untouched.
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As with any story about Johannesburg and South Africa, race plays a central role. Mining is a grueling and dangerous work anywhere you go, and in South African it is most often done by black South Africans either through forced labor or due to almost non-existent options for work and employment. Although freed from the evils of Apartheid, contemporary black workers and inhabitants of the toxic landscape still struggle with systemic and generational inequality. Forced to live amidst the ravaged landscape, many have resorted to sifting through the discarded tailings, scavenging in the city’s dumps or by taking jobs with the new mining companies that have returned to take over the old sites.
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| Tales from the City of Gold. By Jason Larkin. Kehrer Verlag, 2014. |
The book is nicely designed and contains two essays by Julian Rodriguez and Mara Kardas-Nelson that bookend the images and give the work historical and social context. The book also incorporates figurative graphics from an old mining manual along with phrases in Fangalo, a local pidgeon used by the workers. Paired with text, the images reveal the harsh realities experienced by the workers who were tragically deemed disposable and sub-human — dying quickly, then quickly replaced.
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| Tales from the City of Gold. By Jason Larkin. Kehrer Verlag, 2014. |
Although the two essays give the work contextual grounding within South African history and contemporary photography, the images feel oddly removed. While the names of Larkin’s subjects are given, their voices are absent and we learn little about their lives. The particulars are sacrificed for the bigger picture, when the two are not mutually exclusive. Julian Rodriguez locates Larkin’s cool and distanced gaze within contemporary fine-art photography, but given the enormity of the environmental, social and racial injustice the images skirt, the book as a whole seem a bit timid. This is especially true when Rodriguez references the brilliant, brave and unapologetically political work of Ernest Cole, the black South African photographer who risked his life to expose the injustices of Apartheid in his book House of Bondage. Larkin seem reluctant to either embrace the more artistic aspects of the work by leaving more unsaid, or to tackle the larger social and political reality of the work by giving us more information.
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| Tales from the City of Gold. By Jason Larkin. Kehrer Verlag, 2014. |
Larkin clearly cares about his subject and subjects, but I was left craving a more inventive design and a greater use of appropriated source materials. Given the subject’s long and complex history, there are no doubt vast visual and textual resources to drawn on that could have been incorporated into the book, as well as voices that demand to be heard. The inclusion of the book’s two appropriated graphics does more for the book than both essays. At least one of which could have been forgone with a different design and/or use of additional material. Larkin is a very talented photographer who’s tackled an ambitious and important subject that deserves attention. Sadly, it’s a great project that deserves a better book.—ADAM BELL
ADAM BELL is a photographer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and his work has been exhibited and published internationally. He is the co-editor and co-author, with Charles H. Traub and Steve Heller, of The Education of a Photographer (Allworth Press, 2006). His writing has appeared in Foam Magazine, Afterimage, Lay Flat and Ahorn Magazine. He is currently on staff and faculty at the School of Visual Arts' MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department. His website and blog are adambbell.com and adambellphoto.blogspot.com.