From 2000 onwards, he pitched tent in shanty towns, parks, beaches and car parks, anywhere he could interact with the local people in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. The black backdrop was a deliberate device to nullify the background and focus attention on the subject, whatever the circumstance and the location.
The result is a subtle and powerful series of portraits, taken deliberately at dawn or at dusk, of individuals who just happened to be in the vicinity of Appleson’s intriguing and magnetic ‘stage set’. He selected these opposite times of day, not because of the ‘quality of light’ but because he deliberately found the persons out and about during these periods more fundamentally interesting. A further aspect of the project was to present the portraits in chronological order, as the subjects appeared before him – some by request, others who asked to be photographed.
Whether sited in affluent suburbs and tourist areas, or shanty towns and amidst street people, Appleson’s lens is uncritical and welcoming – the subjects were undirected and allowed to create their own sense of ‘the pose’. The list of works in the appendix diligently records the location and the names of the participants, whilst the images themselves are presented without the distraction of any textual detail. Appleson freely admits to offering the ‘Bergies’, a local term for vagrants, a ‘small fee’ for their participation – it might well have helped, he experienced few problems with the natives despite using a 5 x 4, large format reflex camera (unlike his attempt to replicate the project on a British housing estate where he required police rescue). Some Cape Town subjects had to be pre-arranged and were included only after ‘official’ permission had been sought. The police officers were obviously subject to this but surprisingly, Appleson notes, so were the fruit packers. As Alison Green notes in her contributed essay Live Long: individual poses tend to repeat themselves, despite the variable sitters. It is a subconscious response to the ‘ritual’ of being recorded for others to see, a projection of ‘self’ that is rarely satisfied by the finished product.
The result is a humanist parade of Cape Town folks, all printed full page in full colour. A democratic survey, in which each individual portrait is accorded equal status to the next, whatever the social divisions outside the ‘studio’ tent. The fact that one is aware of the vast schisms in the social structure of the country adds extra poignancy to the artist’s technique. Although born in South Africa, Trevor Appleson now lives and works in London. He has not betrayed his homeland with this fine document of Cape Town at the dawn of the new millennium.
