28
B+W
›Mlangeni spent his childhood in the town
and first saw a camera at a wedding at the
age of 17. This relatively late discovery of
photography led him to leave rural life to
travel to Johannesburg in 2001 to attend
the Market Photo Workshop, the renowned
photography school founded by David
Goldblatt in 1989, and which includes Zanele
Muholi and Jodi Bieber among its alumni.
The course immediately opened him up to
the wider potentials of narrative photography.
‘As a street photographer, you think you know
a camera, and you think you understand
photography in your own unique way,’ he
says. ‘But going to a school, that’s where you
start to look at photography as something
very powerful. You can use it to tell a story.’
Mlangeni was 21, could barely speak
English, and was not in any way accustomed
to the demands of urban life – particularly
a metropolis of seven million people like
Johannesburg, with its history of division.
‘The city was alive with people, chaotic and
intense,’ Mlangeni says on the phone from
his home in the city. He admits he struggled
at first. He felt isolated, unable to form
enduring friendships or square the identityhe had formed in Wakkerstroom with the
very different realities of South African’s
biggest city. Although a photography student,
he did not initially know how to capture the
city through his lens. ‘So in a bid to try and
understand the place, I photographed the
buildings,’ he says.
‘I couldn’t understand what people were
saying,’ he says, describing the struggle to
communicate with people in English, which
he was still learning at the time. To avoid
speaking, he channelled his feelings into
photographs of the architecture, which led
to his first series Big City.
As his practice developed, so he began to
incorporate Johannesburg’s people into the
frame. ‘I decided to work with the people and
spaces that are forgotten in our fast-moving
society,’ he says. ‘I wanted to look at the
things people shy away from in the world,
and use that to tell my stories.’As the course wore on, an
overlooked element of the city’s
daily routines started to fascinate
him. He’d wake up in the morning
and marvel at how, just a few hours after
he walked through the rising detritus of
Troyville to find his way home, he’d find the
streets picked clean. ‘I started to think about
the nature of the city at night,’ he says.
‘I thought about the way the city worked
when the rest of us were sleeping.’
He started to learn about Johannesburg’s
street-cleaners, many of whom were female
and from Johannesburg and Soweto’s most
impoverished backgrounds, or they were
immigrant workers from across Africa.
‘Who were these invisible people?’ he
asks. ‘They were doing an important job.
The city was reliant on them. We could see
their work, but it felt like they were hidden
from view.’ One day near his home, ‘I saw
a group of women sitting on the street
before starting work, and then I began
to notice them every day.’
He started to photograph a woman called
Mankosi. After speaking to her, he discovered
she grew up in the nearest neighbouring town ›Above After dark, Kerk Street, 2006. | Opposite top Umtshanyelo, 2006. | Opposite below Invisible woman 1.‘We could see their work,
but it felt like they were
hidden from view.’