Johno Mellish | Conversations in Place

"My pictures of people form a continuous body of work and are a result of my thinking about  the relationship between the material and the emotional in the place that I find myself in. I often wonder what it is that draws me to stay in South Africa - is it my community or is the opportunities that I’m afforded as a result of who I am? The answer lies somewhere between those two questions but the answer itself is still mostly unanswerable."

 

"These photographs then, are depictions of people who I have come across in South Africa - some are my friends, some are strangers, others actors and all collaborators. I want the relationship between person and place to be evident and the complications of that relationship to be looked at photographically."

 

"In establishing the view, or the shot, a place for play is marked out by collaborators and myself,  where spontaneity is the ordering principle. I like the idea of play as a strategy or foil to the power-politics of lens based image making. My work is an exercise in mimicry or transferral - experiments in finding means and modes for the transportation / translation of ideas, stories, histories across time - in short ossifications.  In relation to my work history is interesting but only insofar as it informs the present."

 

"I'm not interested in reportage or documentary but rather the playing out of life in the moment.  This playing out of life is often created with the use of artifice or intervention. I put things together or 'stage' my scene's because this mode is useful in communicating my pictorial questions as clearly as possible." 

"I am interested in the economy of pictures and what trading with pictures means at a very human level. My hope is that my photographs disturb our set ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling and open up a place for continued thinking about what it means to be here, in South Africa."