Wandering the Wild Coast part 2 - Port St Johns - Hippy Central and home to Raconteurs

 

Only 70 more bends to the Spar, proclaims a sign some twenty or so kilometres from Port St Johns. Growing up, I remember the endless corners as dirt roads, soggy and slimy in the wet, sending unwary drivers to the bottom of the pass, often with mortal consequences. Our family experienced this quite terrifyingly as we slid into a spin on one wet corner in the early nineties, saved only by some dense thorn bushes that stopped our descent and the fact that it was so wet and slippery that the car didn’t go into a roll. Now the roads, once terrifyingly interesting, are tamed and smooth with asphalt and innumerable speed humps as the crawl through towns on the road between Mtata and Port St Johns.

Wandering the Wild Coast - Part one, Hole in the Wall

Travel agents use lots of hyperboles when they describe a place that they want to market. Unspoiled, untrammelled, idyllic, virginal and quintessential all come to mind when I think of coastal regions that have been written about in the quest to fill a few more bed nights. The Wild Coast isn't any of these though. That isn't to say that it doesn't deserve it's own set of hyperboles, but that the feel of the Wild Coast is completely different to say that of the Sunshine Coast, or Kwazulu Natal's Hibiscus Coast. Slowness is practically enforced and you need to take a deep breath before entering onto the hairpin bends patrolled by decaying pickup trucks and suicidal taxi drivers. You'd be forgiven for thinking that cattle are sacred as they wander to and fro amongst the traffic and dogs take on a death wish of their own as they run helter-skelter between dangerously swaying trucks.

Prestige and performance - thoughts on high end product announcements in the last month.

Back in the 90s camera manufacturers discovered that they had plateaued in their sales as pretty much every middle class family in the West and Japan had at least one SLR camera. The contraction that followed essentially saw the demise of Minolta, and Olympus very nearly disappeared as a camera manufacturer. Companies like Pentax struggled along and have yet to really recover in terms of market share. To all intents and purposes Pentax didn't recover and this has ultimately led to the sale of Pentax to Ricoh, a company they have been bedfellows with for decades.

Photographing the Other and Making the Unknown Familiar

Mukolfu, a young traditional healer, in trance during an all night drumming session ( a vigil to the Matweti spirits)

Two comments by two extremely talented and important American photographers have been influential as well as cautionary to the photographic images that I work to produce. The first is Diane Arbus, best known for her images of society’s outcastes, who wrote that, “Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to”. The other comment was by Edward Weston when he said that, “Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie”.