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. A book project arising out of my 20-year immersion in the contentious and visceral topic of  land South Africa. This page features a small preview from the book, which is currently in production. 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 the project. She said, "But where is the light? You have such beautiful light in your country". 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 and epic project. 

In 2013, I will invited by David Goldblatt to exhibit part of the series at an exhibition Umhlaba 1913–2013: Commemorating the 1913 Land Act, hosted by the Wits Arts Museum (WAM)  Iziko South African National Gallery (SANG).

"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 that occupies the intersection between social documentary, photojournalism,and landscape photography. 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. With Heartland, photographer Caroline Suzman presents a timely essay on farmland life in South Africa in the 21st century, taking an uncompromising line through the difficult terrains of land reform, rural violence and its effects, labour relations in the agricultural sector, and other ties that bind people and places together in rural South Africa. Heartland, is a work of unflinching realism that nevertheless occupies the intersection of photojournalism, documentary and portraiture, 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.'

Sean Christie, author of Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard, Life Among the Stowaways