After a catch

All works untiltled

The Fisherfolk of Kosi Bay formed part of the first ever exhibition in the Centre for photography Gallery during the 1999 Cape Town Month of Photography.

"When I first began photographing the lives of the fishing communities in Kosi Bay in the late 1980s and early 1990s, their relationship with the conservation authorities was often tense and conflictual. An air of uncertainty prevailed and talk of removals was on everybody's mind. One had the overwhelming sense that here was another indigenous group of people and their traditions who will simply disappear behind a fence to make way for yet another game park to be enjoyed by the privileged.

It was for these reasons, I decided to document their traditional fishtrapping techniques, their culture and how they lived with nature. In the many trips I made over a number of years, I spent a week to ten days at a time, living with the fishing community of Nkovakeni, often visiting other villages in the area. These photographs record my experiences.

Since then, exciting developments have begun to take place: There is no longer talk of removals. Negotiation, participation, shared management and benefits have become points of common interest between the people and conservation authorities.
Kosi Bay is a mecca of biodiversity, boasting a unique ecosystem of lakes. It is also a centre of the loggerhead and leatherback turtle migration who visit northern KwaZulu-Natal coast annually to lay their eggs."

Text by Paul Weinberg

Visit www.paulweinberg.co.za

British Coastline
Roy Metha

Alongside "The Fisherfolk of Kosi Bay" by Paul Wienberg, British Coastline was exhibited in the Centre for photography Gallery during the 1999 Cape Town Month of Photography

The sea has had a profound influence on the shaping of British history and continues to play a part in our evolving sense of national identity(ies). The sea encloses and separates us as a country, and in doing so it symbolically binds us together - as disparate as we are. In defining a geographical space that is "apart", the sea also begs a series of questions: What makes us unique? What brings us here? What makes us stay?

The ragged coastline cradles our negotiations with the sea, emotional and physical. It is a place (stretched over many different social contexts) where we come to shed life's unnecessary burdens, to be who we are, or to fantasise along these lines. It is a place of greetings and farewells, of longing, parting; a place of tranquillity and of dramatic elemental forces.
As the land meets the sea, we come to be on the edge, for a while; on the border, released for some heady moment to experience nature's contingencies. The coastline offers us a glimpse of an incessant desire - the freedom of the spirit. Roy Mehta's new photographic work is set around the British coastline and draws on all these themes, brought together in a highly charged physical and psychological space.

In this space his pictures dwell on people in moments when identities and relationships might be betrayed, or when they might be formed.
Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, young lovers stand revealed, or perhaps make a play for existence itself here on the edge of Britain, and, for all it matters, on the edge of life. Distance, intimacy, affection, regret, all the unconcealed emblems of love and familial entanglement are staged here. And, in Mehta's work, they become metaphors for a national culture at a point of transition.

Bringing together these people and the fragments of an already haphazard landscape of coastal structures and forms, Mehta has created a remarkable portrait of Britain searching for itself: clinging to the past, uncertain of the future, gazing out to sea.

Text by David Chandler, February 1999