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›to Wakkerstroom. She helped him gain
a way in. ‘Being around them was at first
difficult,’ he says. ‘But after I developed a
sense of trust, it was easier. Sometimes
I would leave my camera at home and just
get to know them, help them to clean.
They started to be interested in me, to ask
who I was and where I came from.’
The series was completed in 2006, after
eight months of almost daily work. He called
it Invisible Women and it became his first
exhibited body of work.
Mlangeni’s portraits are intimate,
allowing us to form an intuitive sense
of the stranger in the frame. But the
work is elevated further by Mlangeni’s
understanding of the city’s architecture,
demonstrating an ability to orientate the
cleaners in their locale, using only the light
of the street lamps to illuminate them.
The work, in that sense, is both a Diane
Arbus-esque study of the street-level faces
we can so easily ignore in the maelstrom of
urban life (even as we rely on them), and a
Lewis Baltz-esque elegy to Johannesburg’s
built environment. The barely-held-togethermilieu of the city, the cleaner’s steadfast
cleaning of the same old streets, and the
impact the cleaning of the city has on those
cleaners, all meld into the same frame.After Mlangeni completed Invisible
Women, he decided to start
travelling to the suburban fringes
and smaller towns on the outskirts
of the city – areas that, traditionally, have
been the home of working-class white
Afrikaans. Although a black Zulu, he wanted
to understand how the changes in power
dynamics in South Africa since the end of
apartheid in 1994 had impacted these small
towns. ‘How do they now try to negotiate
the place they call home?’ he says.
He was shocked by what he found. They
were forgotten towns, he says. The region’s
infrastructure had been left to ruin and the
white communities had been laid to waste
by poverty and drug addiction. ‘Something
ghostly was happening there,’ he says. Yet
the images are notable for the kindness he
exhibits through his lens. There’s little sense
of us and them here – and no semblance atall of Mlangeni wanting to separate himself
from his subjects along racial or cultural
lines. There is, instead, the impression that
he’s using the camera as a way of reaching
out to his subjects, offering them a sense
of empathetic understanding.
The series was completed over the course
of three years and resulted in The Ghost
To w n s and My Storie. Other series followed.
No Problem was made during a residency
in the suburb of Alexandra, one of the few
urban areas in South Africa where black
Africans were permitted to possess land
officially in the apartheid years. Umlindelo wa
Makholwa (The Night Vigil of the Believers)
focused on two Zionist churches – one in
Johannesburg and the other in Driefontein.
Country Girls focused on the everyday lives
of the region’s small LGBT communities.
And for the series Men Only he
photographed a men-only hostel in
Johannesburg – one that housed mostly
migrant workers. In many ways it might
have matched up to his own experiences
of Johannesburg when he first arrived in
the city back in 2001.Above Resting, 2006. | Opposite top Ma Mbatha. | Opposite below Low prices daily, 2006.‘Sometimes I would leave my camera at home and just get to know them, help them to clean.’