Heartland
'Suzman’s Heartland is a searing essay on 21st-century farm life in South Africa. Venturing head on into the terrains of land reform, rural violence and its effects, labour relations in the agricultural sector, and other thorny thematics, Suzman gets under the skin of profound human attachments to the land in South Africa'
At a portfolio review at BursaFotoFest in Turkey in 2012, I showed the director of photography for National Geographic Magazine Sarah Leen a small selection of photographs from Heartland. She said, "But where is the light? You have such beautiful light in your country". I thought to myself, beautiful light, yes, and oceans of suffering. It was a difficult paradox to bring out! The book features an accompanying essay by award-winning writer Sean Christie who describes this unique project: "In this timely body of work, photographer Caroline
Suzman explores the paradoxes and human costs of land ownership in South Africa,
and reflects on rural violence, land reparation and its failures after
apartheid. Photographed over a period of 20 years, Heartland is a work of
unflinching realism . Few issues in contemporary South Africa arouse as
much emotion as “the land question”, or reveal as little clarity of
purpose,’ write Cheryl Walker and Ben Cousins in their introduction to Land Divided, Land Restored: Land Reform
in South Africa for the 21st Century. High levels of rural
violence since the 1990s have given rise to severely polarising interpretive lines.
The dominant narrative of ‘farm murders’ foregrounds the killing of white
farmers, while ignoring the very high numbers of black homicide victims in
rural areas.The 2012–2013
Western Cape Farm Workers’ Strike catalysed similarly inflamed emotions, giving
rise to strongly divergent interpretations and views in relation to both causes
and solutions. In December 2019, the Constitution Eighteenth
Amendment Bill which seeks to amend section 25 of the Constitution to provide
for expropriation of land without compensation was gazetted for public comment.
‘The purpose of the Bill is to amend section 25 of the Constitution so as to
provide that the right to property may be limited in such a way that where land
is expropriated for land reform, the amount of compensation payable may be nil.
Further, it aims to clarify that such limitation is a legitimate option for
land reform, to address historic wrongs caused by the arbitrary dispossession
of land, and in so doing ensure equitable access to the land and further
empower the majority of South Africans to be productive participants in
ownership, food security and agricultural reform programmes.’ Meanwhile, life in
rural South Africa continues, its nuanced daily details obscured by the din of
public discourse. Of all media, it
is arguably photography that has opened the clearest lines of sight on rural
life. Powerful work by Santu Mafokeng, David Goldblatt, Paul Weinberg, Ernest
Cole, Peter Magubane, Jürgen Schadeburg and others has focused public attention
on themes like mining/mineworkers, peasant life, landscapes and structures,
people and cultures.In 2013, Wits Arts
Museum (WAM) and Iziko South African National Gallery (SANG) hosted the
exhibition Umhlaba 1913–2013: Commemorating the 1913 Land Act, which featured work by 30
photographers, strongly weighted towards pre-1994 ethnographic explorations, with
a focus on mining. Reviewing the exhibition for the Mail & Guardian, art critic Sean O’Toole described the exhibition’s
evocation of the post-1994 period as ‘shambolic... a rather jumbled selection
of singular images’, suggesting that some promising new directions in social
documentary photography had been overlooked. It is also true though that the photographers
cited by O’Toole – Zanele Muholi, Mikhael Subotzky, Broomberg and Chanarin –
have largely focused on urban themes. Heartland, is a work of unflinching realism that nevertheless occupies the intersection of photojournalism, documentary and portraiture and landscape photography, reproducing Suzman’s view that truth in regard of complex rural social issues lives in the large grey area between the poles of discourse and debate, and that no single recipe exists for capturing it.'
MEDIA RESOURCE
Daily Maverick Tim Bell Expropriation act is the ugly ogre some make it out to be
