ZEKE Fall 2019

Interview
WITH LEKGETHO MAKOLA
by Caterina Clerici
Lekgetho Makola is the Head of Market
Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, South
Africa. He sits on the International Advisory
Committee to the Board of CatchLight, and
was on the Curatorial Advisory Committee
of the 2017 Bamako Encounters. Over the
past few years, he has been on the judging
panels for various national and international
photography and arts awards,
including World Press Photo 2019.
Caterina Clerici: How did you get into
photography?
Lekgetho Makola: My background is
fine arts, painting and sculpture but also
multimedia and the theory of photography.
I worked in museums in Durban, in
post-apartheid South Africa, from 1999,
supporting the collections and archival
units. I also worked as a photographer for
the museums, photographing the artworks
for preservation but also documenting
the events. I was also involved in curation.
Three years later I moved to Cape
Town where I started working as an
exhibition manager at the Robben Island
Museum. That’s where I began working
with photographic archives but also
documenting stories of people who had
been imprisoned on Robben Island since
the 1960s. So that’s when I started really
working with the medium to tell stories.
Later, I got awarded a Ford Foundation
scholarship to go to Howard University
in Washington, D.C. and do an MFA in
Film Studies. I chose that because there
is a lot more work done in film theory
about black filmmaking, especially in the
United States and South America. I think
in those ten years I established my interest
Patrick Selemani
in images, focusing on activism around
images, especially on the (African)
Continent and in the context of post-colonial
South Africa.
CC: What motivated your interest in
images?
LM: Images are carriers of information, but
also more than any other artistic practice,
they reach a very wide audience and have
the potential to impact perceptions. Images
can become an integral part of education:
carrying historic memories, but also helping
people to think creatively or critically
from a younger age. They also help us
understand the context of our country, at a
time when we are trying to find ourselves
outside of the divisions of apartheid.
CC: How did you end up at Market Photo
Workshop?
LM: After completing my studies at
Howard University, I came to the Market
Photo Workshop (MPW) because I had a
very strong background in exhibitions, programming,
and curating. I joined MPW as
their Program and Projects Manager, overseeing
the curriculum and creating synergy
with the public programming side. When
my predecessor, John Fleetwood, resigned
four years ago I took over as the Head of
the school. For me, the school is one of
the most instrumental spaces for learning
and teaching photography, and one that
prioritizes its critical nature — photography
for social change and advocacy. It
aligned with what I’ve been doing since
I completed my undergraduate studies in
1994. I regard myself as an image activist:
I’m thinking about the process of making
an image, and the impact of that image in
society.
CC: What are the themes at the core of the
School’s curriculum?
LM: We believe that all the students who
come into our space — usually 12 per educator
— come in with a particular perspective
or idea that inspires them, and our role
is not to overload them with information,
but to collaborate and bring the photographic
resources and know-how for them
to engage and better tell their own stories.
During apartheid, photography focused
on society and what was happening, documenting
our lives collectively. Post-apartheid,
people want to talk about themselves;
self-reflection, the relationship with the
environment they live in, their home, their
livelihoods, issues of identity: “I’m black in
post-apartheid South Africa. It’s a democracy.
How does it relate to me?” They use
images to explore those questions. One of
the biggest outcomes from our space has
been issues of representation on gender,
sexuality, and non-conforming communities,
and our space has now become what they
regard as a safe space. The focus is on
issues around transgender communities and
acceptance, how people from these communities
photograph themselves. Our public
programming begins to create a platform
for these kinds of discussions, using the
students to lead them.
CC: You mentioned images are also a tool
for social change; have you seen photographic
work translate into a change in the
public’s perception of these issues?
LM: Zanele Muholi (who joined MPW
in 2000) shocked the classrooms and
many male students. One of the issues she
became interested in while in class was
menstruation: she wanted to demystify this
fear males have, but also to confront patriarchy,
and through that process establish
her own definition of gender and how she
wants to be seen. Since then, not only has
she created platforms for people to talk
publicly about gender identity and sexuality,
but she runs schools that help people
from those communities find safe spaces—
not only in South Africa but all over the
world. That’s one example of something
that started in our program but ended up
being quite global. Lolo Veleko also had a
huge impact on young photographers. She
began teaching in the classroom about the
relationship between fashion, space, and
identity. We started seeing a lot of photographers
borrowing from her style, and
some of her work is now studied in relation
to urban development and how to think of
young people in urban settings.
CC: Have you seen any new trends in the
visual language that the new generations
of artists have chosen to express themselves?
LM: In the past three to four years, we’ve
begun to see a change in the texture of
images: people are much more experimental,
they’re going beyond just photographing
what’s happening around them; they’re
52 / ZEKE FALL 2019