Strauss & co - 17 February 2018, Cape Town

149 We see this exploration in the work of the nine photographers represented in Inside Edition . The photographers work within and transform the familiar genres of landscape or portraiture in ways that suggest a setting aside of the constraints of those genres. The works present not only a variety of South African experiences and scenes, but also a number of ways in which experience might be mediated by photography. In some instances, the mediation of experience is a direct engagement with history of place, but in others, history is only glancingly referred to in favour of character, and in still others, neither history nor character take precedence. Rather, the emphasis is on a moment or a mood, not entirely divorced from history – since all of the nine photographers are keenly aware of the context out of which their work flows – but transcending, translating, perhaps even deconstructing the historical moment that has traditionally been the raison d’être of the photograph. What we have represented in Inside Edition are ironists or visual skeptics who offer reflection upon the medium as their primary interest rather than story characters, or subject matter; portraitists who have stripped away all of the accoutrements of identity, or added costume, disguise, and performance to the genre; and finally visual archivists who use the camera to record the accretions of memory and history.