'Double Negative' by Ivan Vladislavic

In the first of the three decades of this book, a rather unfocussed young man stands on a hill above apartheid-era Johannesburg with a renowned photographer and a journalist. As a game, they each pick out a house in the city below, and descend. The photographs the photographer takes at two of the houses become iconic images of a social-realist sort. They don’t reach the third house, the one chosen by the young man, because of failing light. In the second section, the disaffected narrator returns to South Africa following the fall of Apartheid (which occurred in his absence in London). He is now an aspiring photographer himself, and visits the third house to photograph whoever lives there. By the third section, he has become an established photographer (a more superficial version of the first one) and is being interviewed by a rather unfocussed young journalist. Vladislavic’s prose is clear and open, and he gently uses photography as a metaphor for his musings on change and memory, depth and superficiality, authenticity and appearance. What sort of perspective does an instant give on a process, or a detail on a complexity, or a surface on an interiority? Do our experiences and memories really give us much of an understanding of the times we live in and of the lives of others? If we do manage to make more than superficial contact with another person, how is it possible to communicate this when we have only superficial means?

(June 2014)