by Yazeed Kamaldien
Cape Town - A small exhibition of celebrated South African photographer George Hallett’s work has just completed a showing at UCT’s Michaelis Galleries, marking two years since his death.
The exhibition, “it is a gathering of the elders”, is also a research project into the 18 photos on show.
UCT’s Works of Art Committee (WOAC) acquired the photos in 2020. At the time, Maymoena Hallett — the late photographer’s daughter — had launched a fund-raising campaign that included photographic sales to cover her father’s medical expenses.
Hallett was discharged from hospital but succumbed to acute colitis, a chronic disease of the colon, on July 1, 2020.
This exhibition’s curators, Ingrid Masondo and Tshego Mabaso, talked about their process of gathering anecdotes to piece together context to accompany Hallett’s visual storytelling.
WOAC on its website states its goal is to “build a collection of works of art in line with UCT’s vision and mission” and “contribute to an inclusive heritage expression”.
To this end, WOAC recruited the two co-curators to lead this project into a “series of questions relating to artistic production and practice, notions of collaboration, disciplinary and institutional entanglements with photography, and the politics of the archive.”
“As part of the project, we are seeking to collate and present multiple biographies of Hallett,” said Masondo.
Mabaso said among the 18 photos were some that looked familiar but also “people that we don’t know a lot about”.
“That was an interesting pathway to follow, and then try to find more on those people,” she said.
Masondo and Mabaso say a number of well-known South Africans who left apartheid for exile elsewhere are included in the exhibition’s photographs.
Hallett went into exile in 1970, he travelled to London and later lived in Amsterdam and Paris. His lens documented writers, artists and others who were activists against apartheid.
When Hallett returned to South Africa in the 1990s, like many other exiles, he was to be the official photographer of the just-released political prisoner Nelson Mandela.
Hallett’s photos of Mandela showed the soon-to-be president travelling around the country, meeting everyday South Africans while talking peace with the apartheid government that would be dissolved via democratic elections in 1994.
The following year, Hallett won the World Press Photo award for his Mandela photos.
The Mandela collection and thousands of other Hallett photos are now being “unearthed” by his friend Rashid Lombard, a photographer and founder of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, and Maymoena Hallett.
Lombard said Hallett’s “body of work represents such an invaluable and underrated archive of a moment of South Africa's history”.
“We want to form a family trust that will hold the rights. This is a huge collection of work that needs to be digitised,” says Lombard.