665

Making Prints With Light

s tephen inggs

665Making Prints With Light

stephen ingg s

Published by the Michaelis School of Fine ArtUniversity of Cape Town2011

Contents

FOREWORD Nigel Warburton

INTRODUCTION Stephen Inggs

POLAROIDS 1978 - 1987

A POETRY OF PLACES 1993

STANFORD SERIES 1997

CONTINUUM 2000

SENSUM 2002

JOURNEYS / RESIDUUM 2004

TRACES OF PRESENCE Virginia MacKenny

SOLITUDE 2006

STRANDVELD 2008

LEGACY 2011

TYPOLOGY OF PLACE 2008 - 2011

A MAKER OF IMAGES Sean O’Toole

REFERENCES

06

08

18

28

40

52

64

76

88

100

110

118

134

150

158

Foreword

06 nigel warburton

07

A POETRY of OBJECTS

“I have more memories than if I had lived a

thousand years”

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

Objects that have passed through differenthands, perhaps over generations, become worn,bear the traces of their use. The everydayparaphernalia that surrounded us in childhoodbecomes antique and quaint over time, yet ittakes on a mythical significance in the storieswe tell ourselves about where we have comefrom, stirring memories and feelings we mayhave forgotten we ever had, re-invokingscenarios buried deep in our psyches. Like dreamsymbols, such objects carry multiple meaningsand have a powerful emotional resonance.

Abstracted, enlarged, and isolated fromcontext, an old telephone, a pair of dress-maker’sshears, a few flowers in a make-shift vase,acquire an aura and presence both as objects ofaesthetic attention and as catalysts for re-imagining our own past or that of a previousgeneration. In Stephen Inggs’ museum ofmemory equivalents, each photographed relicinvites a poetic reverie of personal associationsthat combines with more public connotationsmade precise by their South African origins.This history of settlement and change issuggested but never laboured. Each imageimplies a particular relation to land, history,and a form of life, yet connects with universal

concerns about the evolving nature of ourrelationship to the place we find ourselves inand to the everyday items around us.

These are not objective re-presentations,but expressive and painterly invocations of asimpler existence that is no longer available;each is imbued with a sense of loss as well asbeauty. The imperfect flowers have anindividuality and fragility lost in an age of mass-cultivated hybrids. A hand-stitched rugby ball,with its dark-pored leather panels, has anorganic quality its acrylic descendants can neverachieve. There is no illusion of a mirror here, notransparent picture of what is in front of Inggs’lens. It is, rather, as if he has coaxed and craftedthese remarkable images into existence fromhis own unconscious rather than found them inthe world. They are re-discoveries that whilefamiliar, have become alien. The passing of timehas changed everything.

NIGEL WARBURTON

is an author and philosopher based in London

08 STEPHEN INGGS

Introduction

09

Work as Process

Most artists at some point have to grapple with the relationship between formand content when making an artwork. As an artist who works in both print andphotography, it is inevitable that I should be concerned how processes andtechniques in these media influence the formal and aesthetic qualities of mywork. This introduction is a discussion about how different technologies haveinfluenced the making of my work rather than focussing on the conceptualand thematic concerns that inform it.

665, the enigmatic title of this book, refers to a type of Polaroid instantfilm1 that is no longer produced and which I have used in the process of makingmuch of my work since Stanford Series. In one sense, this book looks at atrajectory of my artistic production, but it also signifies the end of an era of aparticular kind of analogue photography and marks the advent of digitalphotographic imaging in my own work.

Photography and printmaking’s inextricable relationship, which goesback to the invention of photography and later development of photographicprinting processes, echoes my own engagement with both media since my earlytraining as a student. Subsequently, the work I have produced throughout mycareer as an artist and in my teaching arena has been an exploration of theintersections between these two media. Hence it should not come as any surprise that I place a particularemphasis on the making of work, as print and photographic media require aninvolvement with and understanding of technology and process in ways thatdiffer from other disciplines in art. An important feature distinguishingprintmaking and photography from other creative media is that the substrate,on which the image is made – the plate or negative – is not the work of art.Moreover, the fact that the artwork does not reside in a single original, andthat multiple copies can be made that are all originals, occupies a unique placein our understanding of art where original and copy are both controversial andcontested terms. A definition of an original work of art can be understood to mean thatit has been created directly and personally by a particular artist and is not acopy or imitation. This is also true in printmaking and photography, but theplate or negative in these media, where the original image resides, is not the

1 In 2006 Polaroid discontinued type 665 film and in 2008 announced it was ceasing production ofall instant film altogether.

Stephen Inggs with first camera(1964) London

Polaroid 665 Black & WhiteInstant Pack Film

10 Photos

10

same as the corresponding print or photograph produced from it. Compoundingthis relationship between original and copy is the mimetic nature of photographyand its representation of the real. What is relevant to my work is not photographyor print’s reproducibility, but an interest in how process and personal perceptioncan be combined to translate a re-presentation of something so as to make itoriginal. The liminal nature of making work in printmaking and analoguephotography between what one thinks, what one sees and what one eventuallycreates, has had an impact on my thinking about and approach to making art.The less direct and sequential nature of these media and processes meanshaving to think more carefully about how to make an image, as there are manyvariables and elements of chance before arriving at the final work. In discussing my work, I refer to its process as being entirely handmadeunlike conventional analogue photography. Polaroid 665 film can also belikened to a printmaking process, as each print is pulled between rollers beforebeing peeled apart, similar to the way an etching is pulled through a press andpeeled from a plate. Different from commercially manufactured photographicprinting papers, my work is made using cotton paper prepared by hand-paintinggelatin silver emulsion onto its surface, followed by hand-processing and hand-finishing, giving the prints a distinctive autographic quality. These handmadecharacteristics make it difficult to determine the technological identity of thework because it transgresses traditional boundaries between disciplines. Butit is also the creative possibilities of interpretation in the use of light, degreeof close-up, focus, angle of view, darkroom technique, as well as its beinghandmade, that shapes the appearance of the work. Often imperfect because of the haptic nature of its production, mywork is arguably closer to the visual traditions of hand-produced media likeprintmaking, drawing and painting than to the more mechanical features ofphotography. The aesthetic aspects of handmade production such as the tactilesurface characteristics, mark-making, unpredictability and imperfection areparticularly interesting in the context of the changing nature of photographictechnology, where an image has become a form of text or data as a result ofdigital dematerialisation. Current contemporary forms of digital output2 areoften largely indistinguishable from one another. The deliberate choice toembrace the handmade, tactile and physical aspects of my work, in contrast to

2 The output forms refer to inkjet or archival pigment prints where the spray pattern of the ink isidentical regardless of the printer or substrate used.

Platform 2 (1978)Photo Etching27,5 x 34cm

Another Camel Night (1984)Lithograph52 x 69cm

Garth Walker (1978)Polaroid 665 photograph8,5 x 10,8cm

Reference forAnother Camel Night (1984)Polaroid 665 photograph8,5 x 10,8cm

11

technical perfection, reflect my content and process as well as underliningconceptual references to history, transience and the overlooked. And asindependent writer and critic Lyle Rexer argues,

“Digital imaging is the ultimate symbol of depersonification, a processin which the immaterial and abstract (data) is substituted for the tangible and expressive (the negative, the print), which ideally forms the basis of human transaction. The photograph is a handmade objectthat can be directly and physically exchanged between people.”(Rexer 2002:74)

I am not suggesting here that digital imaging has no place incontemporary art practice, but arguing for the values and aesthetics ofhandmade photographic processes to be considered as a good way of developinga “…sense of a photograph as a physical object, not a text, a visual mystery, nota message, a stimulus to imagine, not a summons used to halt time”(Rexer 2002:93). The processes of photographing objects as still lives and shifting themfrom the locus of obscurity to the locus of display, underlines the way that itis possible for an artist to transform an object’s value, and confer a canonicalstatus to something that has been previously overlooked. Working in this way,allows me to explore how analysis and creative translation can generatemeaning. In depicting objects my intention is to produce visual images that arefree from specific contextual constraints. The absence of any convincing three-dimensional perspectival space in my images gives them a particularconcentration. Working with a medium format Mamiya RZ camera I photographobjects as if in a collapsed space. Everything behind the images is eliminated,suggesting they have no worldly context and resembling what art historianNorman Bryson notes as “the capacity for isolating a purely aesthetic space.Still life is in a sense the great anti-Albertian genre. What it opposes is the ideaof the canvas as a window on the world, leading to a distant view. The furtherzone must be suppressed if still life is to create its principal spatial: nearness”(1990:81). While these cognitive processes cannot be inscribed on an image, theydo help form and develop its meaning. In my work, I try to infuse the imageswith beauty, to explore the tension between a highly mediated photographicimage and the visceral immediacy and materiality of a painterly surface, to tryand make the ordinary marvellous.

Glimpses (1980)Hand-printed booklet

Letterpress29,7 x 21cm

Untitled (1979)Photograph9 x 14cm

South Beach Durban (circa 1970s)Postcard

12

Watering Can (2000)Polaroid 665 negative

Polaroid 665 print8,5 x 10,8cm

13

Watering Can (2000)High-resolution scan from Polaroid 665 Negative

14

Watering Can (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

15

Detail: Watering Can (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

16

Brush (2004) and Butternut (2000)Polaroid 665 negatives

17

Brush (2004) and Butternut (2000)Polaroid 665 prints

Polaroids

18 1978 - 1987

19

SX-70 Polaroid

My interest in photography and Polaroid filmas a way of making images developed when Iwas an art student in the mid-1970s. AlthoughI had begun experimenting with a Polaroid 330camera belonging to the art school, it was onlywhen fellow student and best friend GarthWalker and I bought our own Polaroid SX-70cameras that the exciting possibilities for theexploration of instant photography emerged.

As art students, we could only affordthe bottom-of-the-range plastic model of theSX-70 camera, and a pack of ten-picture filmwas costly, raising the stakes for every shot wetook. Influenced by the likes of Andy Warhol,Lucas Samaras and Guy Bourdin, who were theSX-70 art photographers of the day, we set aboutphotographing anything that had the potentialto make a good image. The object was to see ifwe could successfully transform everydaysubject matter into miniature works of art.

SX-70 Polaroid was considered cutting-edge technology at the time and developed acult following. The film developed automaticallyin broad daylight producing rich, brightlycoloured square-format jewel-like images,

laminated under a plastic layer and framed bya white border. A feature of the film was that itcould be manipulated while developing,allowing one to create effects by drawing onthe plastic layer. But it was the extraordinary,magical quality of SX-70, its iridescent colourand creative possibilities that drew me to themedium.

My Polaroids have never previouslybeen shown because they were used mainly assource material for works I made in other media.But they also hint at concerns that emerged inlater projects. SX-70 film played a significantrole in developing my work because of itsinherent aesthetic and somewhat unpredictablematerial print qualities that challenged theprevailing paradigm of photography at the time.

20

Untitled (1986 and 1978)SX-70 Polaroids10,8cm x 8,5cm

21

Untitled (1982)SX-70 Polaroids10,8cm x 8,5cm

22

Untitled, Paris (1987)Polaroid 669 prints10,8cm x 8,5cm

23

Untitled (1982 and 1978)SX-70 Polaroids10,8cm x 8,5cm

24

Untitled (1982)SX-70 Polaroids10,8cm x 8,5cm

25

Untitled, Paris (1987)Polaroid 669 prints10,8cm x 8,5cm

26

Untitled (1978 and 1985)SX-70 Polaroids10,8cm x 8,5cm

27

Untitled, Paris (1987)Polaroid 669 print8,5cm x 10,8cm

Poetry of Places

28 1993

29

Poetry of Places developed from a romanticpreoccupation with the architecture of high-risebuildings along the Atlantic Seaboard in CapeTown. In the urban landscape unrelatedarchitectural styles are forced into strangejuxtapositions through unpredictabledevelopment, renovation and construction. Butwhat interested me was a poetic sensibilityevoked by the dramatic play of light onarchitectural forms at particular times of theday.

While photographing many buildingsalong the seafront, I simplified the structuresusing light, shadowed planes and tonaldistribution to give greater emphasis to anyexpressive possibilities. Photographic theoristSabine Kriebel makes the point that “althoughphotography’s material base is a mechanicaland chemical process, the medium offers amelancholy poetics – traces of things and placesthat-have-been ….” (Kriebel 2008:20). The ideaof trace interests me not only in its residualmeaning but also in the sense of trying to findor discover something through investigation.

To this end, the series explores ways oftransforming the banal evidence of urbanlandscape into a poetic expression of place.Literary critic Walter Benjamin said of EugeneAtget's early-1900s photography of desertedParis streets that he “photographed them likescenes of a crime for the purpose of establishingevidence” (Benjamin 1979:228).

This evidentiary quality of photographywas an area of exploration that developed in mywork, particularly in the way close-ups andenlargement can be used to reveal and makethings more visible. In printing, making thescale of the work as large as possible drawsattention to the formal and contextual presenceof buildings and their permanence.

A chance processing accident thathappened to some of my negatives duringprocessing resulted in a reticulated visualquality to the photographs, which advanced theidea of photographic emulsion as beingequivalent to a skin. This concept of skin andthe way it corresponds with the human agingled me to think about these works as portraitsof domestic architecture in which buildingscould be re-imagined as a reflection on time.

30

Tower (1993)Lithograph

217cm x 105cm

31

NY Lofts (1989)Drawing

56 x 76cm

32

Balconies (1989)Drawing

56 x 76cm

33

Open Window (1989)Drawing

56 x 76cm

34

Shelbourne (1993)Lithograph69 x 52cm

35

Untilted (1993)Silver gelatin fibre print

60,5 x 51cm

36

Untilted (1993)Silver gelatin fibre print

51 x 60,5cm

37

Untilted (1993)Silver gelatin fibre print

60,5 x 51cm

38

Untilted (1993)Silver gelatin fibre print

51 x 60,5cm

39

Untilted (1993)Silver gelatin fibre print

51 x 60,5cm

Stanford Series

40 1997

41

The impetus for this series was a particularfascination with the discovery, whilst weekendgardening at Stanford, of found 19th-centuryStaffordshire ceramic shards and theirreference as remnants of history and culture.These surviving traces of past culturalproduction are reminders of the transience ofartifacts in the way they have become fragmentsof debris but at the same time have left anindelible impact and influence on society.

The shards have a significant historicalreference to the cultural colonisation of theCape by the Dutch, through the trade route toBatavia in the East, and later by the British.The images refer to information about thenatural terrain, such as topography, rivers andland cover, and man-made infrastructures suchas roads and buildings. These topographicalviews refer to the land in terms of structuresand divisions, and the wealth generated throughthe production of farming or the erection ofbuildings.

During the 19th-century beforemunicipal garbage collection, solid waste wassimply tossed into the garden away from thehouse. This was fortuitous for me becausefinding these long since discarded shards setin motion a process of scavenging that extendedto collecting other objects that subsequentlyfound their way into the series. In making theseimages I looked for a way of creating a visualcorrespondence with the unearthing of theshards by photographing them against blackvelvet to suggest the absence of light of their

burial. The absorption of light by the velvetensured a maximum density of black in theprints, which in addition to their massiveenlargement gives the shards a jewel-likepresence and intensity.

42

Stanford Series XVll (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

43

Stanford Series XXV (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

50 x 60cm

44

Stanford Series V (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

45

Stanford Series XX (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

46

Stanford Series XlV (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

47

Stanford Series Xlll (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

48

Stanford Series XXVlll (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

49

Stanford Series XXVll (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

50

Stanford Series Vlll (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

51

Stanford Series Xlll (1997)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

65 x 50cm

Continuum

52 2000

53

Continuum engages in a kind of‘archaeographical’ process of finding, collectingand recording, exploring the use of foundobjects as emblems of transience. But whereaspreviously the objects in Stanford Series wereunearthed, the objects in Continuum come froma broader surface investigation in and aroundthe village of Stanford. They are mostly humbleobjects derived from material culture andnature; enamel jugs and plates, tarnishedspoons, vegetables and zoological detritus.These basic forms have remained virtuallyunchanged over time and refer historically,culturally and environmentally to the worldthat produced them.

Art historian Norman Bryson in hisbook Looking at the Overlooked makes referenceto rhopography, a term used mainly in painting,but applicable to my work, to describe thedepiction of subject matter consideredinsignificant or trivial, such as still life. Brysonsuggests that “rhopography finds the truth ofhuman life in those things which greatnessoverlooks, the ordinariness of daily routine andthe anonymous, creatural life of the table”(Bryson 1990:61).

Continuum is not intended as way ofmemorialising objects, but rather should beseen as an investigation into finding beauty inthe mundane. My interest was in transformingthe intrinsically humble genre of still life frommerely representing reality to presenting animage so that it seems more wonderful, moreintriguing and better than the objectsthemselves.

54

Watering Can (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

55

Clock (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

56

Bucket (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

57

Bucket ll (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

58

Jug (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

59

Plate (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

60

Spoons (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

61

Stone (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

62

Frog (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

63

Wing (2000)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Sensum

64 2002

65

Sensum was indirectly inspired by an anecdoteabout a partially sighted man living in thevillage of Stanford who occasionally worked onthe roof of his home, under the supervision anddirection of his wife standing below. At a garagesale held by his wife some months after hisdeath, I bought several of his hand tools. Thelove and care evident in the tender repairs tothese sad-looking tools imparted them with anaesthetic presence that inspired me tophotograph them as subject matter. What thissuggested to me was how objects and theirimages can have a metonymic association andeven trigger an empathic response.

A central theme in both the Sensum andContinuum series is the investigation of classesof objects with common characteristicsaccording to type. This typological approach tothe work looks at the comparative analysis ofstructural and formal characteristics and theway “objects are seen as one of several ways ofnarrating the past” (Pearce 1994:21). Themessage or meaning that each individual imageoffers in the series is incomplete, but thecollective body of images broadly engagesquestions of transience, history and meaning.

What interested me in this series wasthe challenge of transforming the ordinary intothe sublime and the idea of memoryassociatively connected to objects. SusanPearce, a professor of museum studies, speaksof “the emotional potency which undoubtedlyresides in many supposedly dead objects”(1994:26). She goes on to suggest that ourrelationship with the material culture of thepast is inextricably bound to the way weconstruct our present. The title Sensum (alsoreferred to as sense-datum) is a term inphilosophy that refers to an immediate objectof perception, which is not a material object; asense impression.

66

Wire (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

67

Letters (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

68

Torch (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

69

Fan (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

70

Roses (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

71

Still Life with Stompie (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

72

Box (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

73

Canvas (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

74

Tools (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

75

Horns l (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

76 virginia mackenny

Traces of Presence

Stephen Inggs is perhaps best known as an artist working in photographyand print who records the quotidian objects of South African history andplace with a sensuous attention to detail. Photographing an old jug, a bucketof proteas, hand tools, a pile of books or a bundle of fence wire, he isolatesthe ordinary, centralises it and elevates it beyond its mundane status in large-scale prints.

Inggs’ obvious reverence for what his viewfinder frames and hisconcomitant highly aesthetic images may lead the casual observer to beseduced into an apparently comforting nostalgia. The sacralising focus ofInggs’ lens, however, creates icons of the everyday and points to more seriousconcerns. Recording attrition in the minutiae of erosion and abrasion ofsurface, his choice of subjects, with its lexicon of clocks, skulls, stones andflowers, is similar in many ways to Dutch 17th-century vanitas painting,reminding us of time and hence our own mortality.

For the purposes of this essay I would like to focus on two particularworks that Inggs produced in 2006 that, I proffer, act as a fulcrum for manyof his concerns. The two works in question are part of the series Solitude andare 100 Years of Solitude I and 100 Years of Solitude II. The first is an imageof a section of two pages of a diary handwritten in ink. The second is theblotting paper, thick and absorbent, used to secure the pen’s trace in the diary.Although, or perhaps because these two prints differ in a number of respectsfrom much of his work produced since the Continuum series of 2000, theyprove useful in considering the wider concerns of his oeuvre.

Firstly, it is notably rare for Inggs to give a work a title that is anythingbut simply descriptive. His normal mode of titling isolates the object, muchas his lens does, and gives it a general identification; Wire (2002), Roses

(2002), Books (2003), Large Rose (2004), Fence I (2006), etc. His chosen objects,while sometimes loosely identified with a generic ‘times past’, are not situatedin a specific history. Without particularising dates, they reassure one of therepetitive continuity of ordinary life.

In the case of 100 Years of Solitude I and II the title is not literal 1,neither is it Inggs’ own. It references the eponymous novel by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, first published in Spanish

77

1 Another instance of a more open titling occurs in the same series Solitude where Inggs has designatedimages of the open Karoo landscape, not with their specific place names, but as Terra Incognita I, TerraIncognita II and Terra Incognita III. The implication of a larger field of reference to lands unknown, aslabelled in maps of the sixteenth century, has implications for a broader reading of his production.

Books (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Tools (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

100 Years of Solitude l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

in 1967. 100 Years of Solitude introduced Latin American magic realism to alarger audience and tells the story of a family living in the fictional town ofMacondo. In the novel time itself is a central player. It often seems to lapse,stop or repeat itself. As it moves on its apparently infinitely fluid course, theclarity of logical chronology is lost and the intersections of different elementsof the story overlay each other. Critical to Inggs’ use of the book’s title for hisimages of the diary pages and blotter is the reference to extended solitarytime and the idea of synchronous realities.

100 Years of Solitude I and II (2006) have their genesis in one of Inggs’forays into the Karoo in the Western Cape where he engaged a farm managerin conversation. Asked if there was anything that he might know of, or have,that could be of interest to the artist, the manager presented Inggs with severaldiaries that had been found in an abandoned farmhouse. Over a century old,the entries were written by an English-speaking farmer's wife in what Inggsdescribes as a “particularly unemotional style of prose”2. In one of the entries,for example, she notes that she had given birth to a son and immediately afterthat she lists what the labourers had harvested from the fields that day. Statedas simple matters of fact without hierarchy or apparent attachment, thesenotations serve, for Inggs, as a reflection of a stoicism borne out of havingto endure the hardship of farming this semi-desert region.

The privations of such a life are underlined by his choice of diary for100 Years of Solitude I. An extra copy from a previous year was put to use thenext year by crossing out the original dates and rewriting the new ones in byhand. While on one level the use of the preceding year’s diary speaks, forInggs, of the “frugality of existence” 3 his choice of it, with its handwrittendate overwriting the printed one, serves as a pointer to a variety of concernsin his work.

In documenting the diary, Inggs breaks with his habit of isolating thecomplete object of his focus in the middle of his format. As if noting a seamlesscontinuity from one year to the next, the diary pages are not presented intheir entirety – the margins on all sides are cropped, randomly ending witha dispersed edge. While the text can be read and one can make out descriptionsof the weather, “partly cloudy all day”, and sentences such as “Jacob did a littlemealie shelling” and “Collyer paid me for two bags of barley”, the truncated

78

2 Email interview with the artist October 3, 2009.

3 Ibid.

100 Years of Solitude ll (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

borders of the pages means we are rarely privy to the full copy of the eventsof any day. Inggs’ focus seems to be less on the content of the text and moreon the fact of the handwriting itself and the implications of replication andoverwriting.

Handwriting, as subject, has signature implications. As Sonja Neefand José van Dijck point out in their book Sign Here!: Handwriting In The Age

Of New Media, it “always gets its cultural authority from its claim of springingfrom a physical and living hand – a claim Benjamin would call the undividable‘here and now’ of presence” (Neef & van Dijck 2006:15). They further assertthat this contemporaneous presence “holds even if the subject of writing isno longer there, as Derrida emphasises, ‘even after death’ (1988:5)” (in Neef& van Dijck 2006:15).

The now deceased author of Inggs’ diary is thus still, in a sense,present – embedded, as it were, in the autographic script that marks the factthat she was, once, here. Inggs is clearly interested in such a presence, butthis is not all he is engaged with in this work. If only interested in notions ofauthentic presence, he could for instance, have chosen to present the originaldiary as found object. Instead he chooses to re-present it and the method ofhis doing so is telling and multivalent.

Using an indexical 4 medium such as photography, and in Inggs’ casethe Polaroid photograph, as his primary means of recording the diary ensuresthat the presence of the author continues to be signalled, albeit by proxy, andat one remove. The immediacy and directness of this mode of documentationis, however, somewhat disrupted by Inggs’ decision not to present hisphotographs of the found object as final work but, instead, to process theimage again. He paints cotton rag paper with gelatin silver photographicemulsion, allowing him both to transfer the image and enlarge it. Thisintervention into the presentation of the image has a number of implications.On one level it takes the viewer yet another step away from the object depictedbut also alerts one to the performance of making and viewing an image.

Inggs’ act of re-presentation is also an act of “remediation”, wherethe object is not only re-presented, but the media of its representation ischanged. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, in their now classic book ReMediation

79

4 Peirce’s term ‘indexicality’ refers to the physical relationship between the object photographed andthe resulting image. Photography is “indexical insofar as the represented object is ‘imprinted’ by lightand the chemical (or more recently electronic) process on the image, creating a visual likeness with adegree of accuracy and “truthfulness” unattainable in purely iconic signs such as painting, drawing, orsculpture” (Sadowski 2009:1).

explore how new types of media re-interpret and concurrently re-form othermedia, and, consequently, shift their uses and meanings. Bolter and Grusin’sconcerns are picked up by Neef and van Dijck in their exploration ofhandwritten text when they ask what happens “when script is performed ina second medium?” (Neef and van Dijck 2006:13). In Inggs’ case, the questionwould need to be expanded to enquire what happens when script is performedin a third medium?

In order to particularise the answer it is necessary to engage thehybridity of Inggs’ production as a photographer/printmaker. Inggs’ interestin both photographic documentation and fine art printing interweaves twoneeds: the need to record an object and the need to make an image, not simplyreproduce one. These needs are inextricably intertwined and, as Bolter andGrusin point out, “the process of remediation makes us aware that all mediaare at one level a ‘play of signs’” (Bolter and Grusin 1999:18). It is in this playof signs that Inggs’ work finds its rationale.

If one turns to the companion piece of 100 Years of Solitude I, thisfocus is exemplified. 100 Years of Solitude II records a simple gesture froma time when texts were written with quills or fountain pens and the residualink was blotted to stop it from smudging. In the case of this piece, like theimage of the diary pages, Inggs is not interested in the content per se of thetext – which is, in this instance of course, indecipherable. He acknowledges,however, that his response to the blotter comes from its visible manifestationof “the idea of the trace” and he openly enjoys “the printerly qualities embodiedin its materiality”. 5 The sullied blotting paper, carrying a script never meantto be read, marks, like spoor, the track and presence of the writer. It is theresidual impression of something that was once written, like the diary pages,but is already at one step removed and, in addition, reversed. It has, in essence,most of the characteristics of a print, bar the intention to create somethingfor public perusal.

This image of a fragment of throwaway paper with its palimpsest ofblotted marks embodies Inggs’ fascination with trace, sign, testimony, imprint,erasure, representation and history. It is, in essence, a singularly succinctmanifestation of the play between autographic and allographic 6 forms ofartmaking.

80

5 Email interview with the artist October 3, 2009.

Key to this of course is the original handwriting in the diary. Whilehandwriting is probably generally considered the most preeminent form ofautographic representation, Neef and van Dijck argue that handwriting alsooccupies both territories. They posit that its “specific materiality qualifiesthe handwritten text as allographic and autographic at once; its semioticsunfolds in this in-between-media, as ‘text-image’ or as ‘image-text’” (Neef &van Dijck 2006:13). It is perhaps easiest to understand text as image inilluminated manuscripts. It is in such manuscripts that “the large initialcapital letters may be elaborately decorated, but they still constitute part ofthe text itself, and we are challenged to appreciate the integration of text andimage” (Bolter & Grusin 1999:12). Neef and van Dijck, however, push theargument for handwriting’s hybridity further. They assert that

“moreover, handwriting as a specific form of writing emphasising the individual …, finds an audible pendant in the voice, which is as un- exchangeable as handwriting. Because of this audible dimension,handwriting may also appear as a ‘sound-image’.” (Neef and van Dijck2006:13)

Here handwriting is “mediated” because it is a hybrid mediumcomposed of visual (writing), audible (speech), and verbal (language) media.Handwriting’s hybrid status becomes particularly visible when it isincorporated in another medium – when it is thus literally “re-mediated” (Neefand van Dijck 2006:13).

If handwriting is an intermeshing of image, sound and text it followsthat in the re-mediation of the diary pages Inggs’ prints open up a complexplay of visual and verbal intertextuality. Printmaking is, according toGoodman’s definition, a stage two or allographic art, in that the artwork doesnot reside in one unique original as does a painting, but can exist in manyreproductions. He notes that a work can only be effectively defined asautographic if “even the most exact duplication of it does not … count asgenuine” (Goodman 1976:113). Any work that is done in one stage remainsautographic, any work that requires a second stage to realise its completionis allographic.

81

6 These terms, examined in depth by Nelson Goodman in his Languages Of Art: An Approach To ATheory Of Symbols, mark the distinction between a “one-stage art i.e. painting where the end productis the art (autographic) and two-stage art i.e. music where the score can be reprinted/ reproduced(allographic) yet the art is in the playing/concert” (Goodman 1976:114).

82

7 In his discussion on etching he furthers his point noting that “even the most exact copy producedotherwise than by printing from that plate counts not as an original but as an imitation or forgery”(Goodman 1976:114).

8 It is perhaps important to note that while Brush is apparently presented in a simple manner, it is partof Journeys, a series where Inggs chose to rephotograph most of the images as suspended from bulldogclips. This deviation from his normal method of presenting the images overtly emphasises their ‘objectness’as prints or constructed images.

Brush (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Canvas (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

According to Goodman, however, printmaking occupies a special position for,while being overtly allographic, it is “yet autographic”7 (Goodman 1976:114).Prints, he says, are the “end-products; and although they may differ appreciablyfrom one another, all are instances of the original work” (Goodman 1976:114).

If even multiples can be originals, so too can copies. In this playbetween the original and its mediated form there is an oscillation “betweenimmediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity” (Bolter &Grusin 1999:18). In the processes of production in the representation of thediary script another hand is now foregrounded – Inggs’ own. The presence ofthe artist’s hand, directly signalled in the irregularities of the brush marksof the emulsion, not only disturbs the coherence of the surface of the image,but also becomes the sign of another authorial hand, thereby upsetting thenotion of a singular point of origin for the handwritten text/image.

Thus it is in the particularities of gesture, the autographic mark, thatthe printmaker asserts his primary presence. Interestingly this, in itself,marks yet another shift in mediation given that it occurs through an actionthat references the traditional discipline of painting.

Inggs’ interest in painting as a subtext in his production is also evidentin Canvas (2002) and Brush (2004). The most standard of signifiers oftraditional artistic production, the paintbrush, is presented in astraightforward fashion8 while the canvas is seen, not from the front, butfrom the back. Complete with its wedges, and the name of the company thatdistributed it – Waltons – it speaks of its provenance as a canvas per se, ratherthan as a painting by someone. Because it is turned away from us we are notprivy to the image on its surface, indeed, if there even is one. Thus reversed,it remains an open field of speculation – a place of pictorial imagining andtherefore useful to Inggs, the printmaker, used to the play with inversion inthe manifestation of images. Here the print both creates, and denies, accessto the picture.

An image that has no overt or apparent reference to artistic practiceis Sea (2006). Included in the series Solitude, Sea, however, embodies a

83

9 Inggs did produce a number of images of the sea in his earlier work when he resided in Durbanduring the late 70s and when he first came to Cape Town in 1985, but most of these referenced thebeach and the manmade structures that are prevalent in many a seaside town. None were just of the seaitself and this seems to be the only direct image of the sea in his work post 2000.

Sea (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Detail: Sea (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Caspar David Friedrich,Monk by the Sea,

c. 1809, oil on canvas,110 x 171.5 cm

Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Mussen, Berlin

similarity in form to the fluidity of paint and/or the photographic emulsionInggs uses to produce his images.

In Sea the image of the water fills the page edge to edge, sans horizon.The zone where the image stops and the paper is seen once again is raggedand indeterminate, defined in part by the irregular form of the waves andthen again by the mark of the loosely brushed-on gelatin silver emulsion. Thegelatin silver holds the image, but where the brush fails to deposit emulsionon the paper, pictorial content drops out altogether, leaving an image thatdisperses/dissolves at the edges. This reiteration of edge is particularly evidentat the lower perimeter of the image. Here Inggs generates a number oftransitions towards the limit of the paper, each one marking the making ofthe print in its various manifestations. The edge of the image laps at the edgeof the photographic emulsion, which is defined by the edge of the Polaroid.The Polaroid in its turn is situated on the edge of the actual page of the printwhich, being a 100% cotton rag paper, has a deckle edge, thereby softeningthe definition of the termination of the page.

This constant reiteration of edge gently traces the perimeter of theseen object/field. The image is framed and reframed through the processesof its own making. Much as an icon will have multiple haloes around acentralised image helping to focus the worshipper’s eye and mind for prayer,Inggs’ borders alert us to image as central subject. Contrary to creatingcertitude however, Inggs’ manifold edges create doubt as to where the actualimage stops or starts. It deters conviction and alerts us each time to anotherpossible point of origin in the process of production.

This image of the sea is unique in Inggs’ oeuvre.9 While his workabounds with dry Karoo landscapes, he only once takes us to this fluid placeof the unmarkable. Casper David Friedrich’s Monk By the Sea (1809-10), withits lone figure facing the grey void of the open sea ahead of him, is echoedhere as we, the viewers this time, are left staring at this surface with no placeof anchorage. While Inggs’ images of domestic items secure the viewer in thequotidian, the sea is emblematic of constant flux and the vast unknown.

Sea bears a surprising visual similitude to 100 Hundred Years of

Solitude I. The similarities between them are multiple and not evident in anyother image in Inggs’ production. Particular to both images is the fact that

neither of them presents the edge of an object to view. Both images deny theviewer a horizon line, and both have an emphasis on horizontality emphasisedby repetitively delineated parallel markings – in one the waves, in the otherthe lines of text. The lack of defining edge in both images implies an infiniteextension or continuum – one natural, the other human10 – and possibly positsa connection between the two.

Pointedly however, the organic nature of the handwritten text isinterrupted by the clean-cut upright seam of the binding. This line that runsfrom top to bottom bifurcating the pages, introduces an understatedcompositional intersection between the horizontal and the vertical elementsof the image. It animates the play between passive and active, underlininghuman activity in the production of both the diary and Inggs’ image of it.Such intersections are apparent throughout the play of images in Inggs’production both formally and figuratively and often come unexpectedly andwork at a number of levels.

Inggs’ inclusion of an image of the sea amongst his Karoo artefactsand landscapes may seem strange, unless one is aware that over 250 millionyears ago the Karoo was covered by an inland sea. The Karoo basin with itssedimentary deposits is one of the richest repositories of the earth’s historyon the planet. It spans “a time period from the Late Carboniferous (300 millionyears ago) to the Early Jurassic (180 million years ago) and preserves a world-class assemblage of fossils” (Rubidge 2007:1). Perhaps then it is less surprisingthat in the only other image where Inggs references the ocean, it is representedby proxy and in the fixed and finite form of a fossil. Fossil (2006)11 is an imageof a fossilised coelacanth – rendered forever set in its bed of stone. Longthought to be extinct,12 the coelacanth is now known to survive in the depthsof the ocean off the east coast of southern Africa and around Indonesia.Virtually unchanged for the last 380 million years, it is often described as aliving fossil and in both its living form and in the rock it functions as trace,as an imprint of the past.

100 Years of Solitude l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

84

10 Inggs’ interest in an extended seamless field is initially signalled by his series of objects in Continuum(2000). Each object, however, occupies the centre of the format and none follow the compositionaldecisions of Sea or 100 Years of Solitude I.

11 Fossil is in the same series Solitude in which Sea and 100 Hundred Years of Solitude I and II arefound.

12 The coelacanth was first discovered in a fossil form dated 400 million years back. In 1938, MarjorieCourtenay-Latimer discovered one in a fisherman’s catch off the coast of East London. A number havenow been caught and colonies have been sighted in Sodwana Bay and off the Comores, Madagascar andIndonesia.

Sea (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Fossil ll (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Inggs’ fascination with the lineage of forms and traces of history,both human and natural, provides a continuing dialogue throughout his work.In 100 Years of Solitude I and II a specific linearity in the handwritten texttranscribes and demarcates human presence, but linearity as an indicator ofhuman activity manifests itself in myriad ways in Inggs’ work. Straight linesinscribed on the landscape impose boundaries as in Fence I (2006) and thetrack of a dirt road cutting across the country as in Road Anysberg (2008)are familiar indicators of human activity. Smaller, more random, individualinstances of the trace of the hand, while not literally drawn, may evoke thescrawled or scribbled mark and are evident in such tasks as the winding upof a bundle of string or wire.

Such marking of activity is documented by Inggs, who has an eye forisomorphic correspondences between human production and the naturalworld. These visual similarities, while apparently random, once highlighted,posit a widening field of representation that acknowledges a kinship betweenhuman activity and natural process. The activity of a bird building its homein Nest (2000) might have an affinity with Wire (2002) much as does Wire

Bundle (2006) with the pattern of tree growth in De Hoop Landscape (2007).Visual similarity in otherwise disparate objects may lead one to expand

one’s notion of the potential links across images and dissolve the hierarchybetween things. As Barbara Maria Stafford in her book Visual Analogy

suggests, such work asks the viewer to draw on their analogising powers and“discern synecdochic connections between fragments from the past and thedisjunctive appearances of the present” (Stafford 2001:41).

In summation the two prints 100 Years of Solitude I and II are pivotalin Inggs’ oeuvre because they provide a place where many of his ideas revolve.An artefact discovered on one of his forays into the Karoo, the found diary,unique and individual, provides original copy. The word ‘copy’, in this sensesimply means ‘text’, as in the record provided by the diary writer. The word‘copy’ however, slips anchor from the security of its position as original whenit also functions as a verb. Inggs activates this when he photographicallydocuments and prints his work, thereby replicating the diary pages. The diaryis, in itself, however, already a copy from a previous year. Overwritten in theoriginal, Inggs’ print provides a visible stratification of the layers of itsreproduction, tracing the sedimentation of each process. By allowing theframing edge of each process to be visible, the levels of re-presentation becomeapparent. The handwritten text, already an imprint, is re-presented thrice

85

Fence l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

String (2002)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

De Hoop Landscape (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

removed from the original in Inggs’ print. 13 But the primacy of the hand isactivated yet again, from the other end of the process, when Inggs brushesthe photographic emulsion onto the paper thereby signalling his hand in, andauthorship of, the image.

Inggs regards the diary, “in the context of extreme isolation andsolitude”, as serving to “act as a means of defining one's existence.”14 Theprint with its autographic/allographic hybridity links Inggs to the writer ofthe diary, perhaps to the writers of many diaries, where each of us inscribesour mark, leaving our trace, defining our presence in the face of isolation.

VIRGINIA MACKENNY

is an artist and writer based at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town

86

13 In the image of the blotter in 100 Years of Solitude II it might be argued that the final print is fourtimes removed from the original – an interesting conundrum for Plato.

14 Email interview with the artist October 3, 2009.

87

100 Years of Solitude l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

100 Years of Solitude ll (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Journeys / Residuum

88 2004

89

Journeys/Residuum was intended as the lastseries in a trilogy of exhibitions that exploredthe discursive nature of objects and the waythey can have meaning that is not necessarilyinherent in the objects or landscapesthemselves. The potential of objects and imagesto act as signs, to signify aspects of society andculture outside of their physical characteristicsis something that fascinates me and inspiresmy work.

The images that compriseJourneys/Residuum are the result of a deepattraction to and love of photographing objects,natural forms and landscapes. Looking for andfinding correspondences and connectionsbetween images and other things can influenceunforeseen meaning in the work. Thisprovisional quality and potential for more thanone meaning, whether consciously activated ornot, is often the reason why I am drawn tophotograph a particular object or landscape.

Rosalind Krauss refers to the indexicalnature of the photograph, in addition to otherterms she uses like trace, imprint and transfer,to suggest the inextricable relationship betweena photographic image and thing it stands in for.But it is not only this kind of trace between theprint and the negative that interests me. Rather,it is the way in which objects and landscapescan hold or suggest traces of existence, of whathas been left behind, that compels me tophotograph them.

The title of the series comes from oneof the images, Journeys and Researches, inwhich an old book is photographed without itshard cover revealing the title and introductionby the author explorer David Livingstone. Notonly did the book title and content interest mefor obvious reasons, but also its appearance hadan isomorphic correspondence with alithographic stone which was the printingprocess for many books at that time. Themeaning of the word residuum is a substanceor thing that is left behind. This double titleencapsulates the two concerns that informedthe creative production of the series.

90

Tricycle (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

91

Trophies (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

92

Wire Basket (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

93

Wooden Pegs (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

94

Journeys and Researches (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

95

Books (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

96

Footpath (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

97

Bot River Landscape (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

98

Fencepost (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

99

Trough (2004)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Solitude

100 2006

101

Solitude is series of work informed by bothancient and recent history scored and inscribedinto the landscape of the Karoo. Traces left onthe land are visual evidence of millennia ofhistory as well as more recent events, rangingfrom ancient fossils and Bushman rockpaintings to wire fences erected by farmers inthe 1800s.

In this vast, inhospitable andmysterious terrain the sense of isolation andsolitude is palpable and confronts the psycheand imagination very directly. The visualintensity of the land and its corresponding airof isolation provided the starting point for myengagement with the Karoo and simultaneouslywith personal questions around the meaningand impact of solitude as a way of being. Iwanted to capture something of the emotionaland spiritual register of the landscape of theKaroo, where – in a sense – time seems to standstill. It is a place constructed as much in theimagination as it is by the processes of millionsof years of pre-history, reaching back to a timelong before the advent of mankind. Once aninland sea, the Karoo has links with Antarcticain that identical fossils from the early Triassichave been found in both locations.1 What I findintriguing about this connection is a sense of

similarly extreme climatic conditions, as wellas the remoteness from other inhabited areasthat both locations share even after eons ofgeographic separation.

My experience suggested the idea of avisual narrative, reminiscent of a palimpsest,that would not only be referenced through theexterior physical landscape and selected foundobjects, but also through the expression of myown emotional interior, in this way describingmy personal account of the meaning, value andimpact of solitude. Olive Schreiner (Ralph Iron)writes of the Karoo’s “oppressive beauty” in TheStory of an African Farm but more often thannot her descriptions of the landscape are ametaphor for a journey that is inward and self-discovering. What I am suggesting here is thaton one level my work also acts self-referentiallyas a metaphor for my own personal experience.

1 A research team in 2003 led by palaeontologist Roger Smith of Iziko South African Museum made the discovery of a curled-upskeleton, Thrinaxodon lihorhinus, on top of Graphite Peak in Antarctica. Identical fossils are also found in the Karoo.

102

Fence l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

103

Gate l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

104

Terra Incognito lll (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

105

Terra Incognito l (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

106

Aloe (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

107

Wire Bundle (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

108

Chair (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

109

Hat Mould (2006)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Strandveld

110 2008

111

Strandveld series has as its origin two road trips— one a coastal route connecting lighthousesalong the Southern Cape, the other inlandthrough the little Karoo. These excursionsprovided an opportunity to meditate on notionsof place and time, particularly the unmappable,immeasurable sense of the highly evocativelandscapes. As French anthropologist MarcAugé observes, places

“want to be — people want them to be — places of identity, of relations and of

history; they have a principle of meaning for those inhabiting them, andintelligibility for those observing them.”(Augé 1995:52)

In its literal translation, Strandveldmakes reference to a particular region in theWestern Cape where the borders between theshoreline and inland have blurred to produce aunique biome. Experienced in its raw isolationand immensity, this landscape of strangejuxtapositions compels contemplation of thenature of place and time — both physical(existence, absence) and metaphysical (identity,otherness, context). As a title to this body ofwork, however, Strandveld extends from itsgeographical reference and gestures towards aparadoxical co-existence between twofundamentally divergent places.

It was during my own journey throughthese landscapes that I came across an arcanemuseum of found and donated objects thatreferenced historical events in the Strandveldregion. Inspired by this idiosyncratic collectionof material, I photographed a selection of objectsfrom the museum that for me evoked a senseof place and history for this series.

As a body of work, Strandveld seriescan be read as an archive of time and place. Itis the nexus of a constantly expandinganthology of the overlooked. In my workrecording these places and things that areinherently transient gives credence not just to“the places marked by road signs and maps, butalso the less tangible but no less meaningfulplaces forged in the crucible of memory, longingand desire” (Golden 2001:20).

112

Propeller (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

113

Coral (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

114

Clouds (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

115

Nasturtium (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

116

De Hoop Landscape (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

117

Anysberg Road (2008)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Legacy

118 2011

119

The dual meaning of the word legacy can implya bequest, or a consequence, of something thathas been left behind or handed down by apredecessor. Objects that have survived or beenpassed down over generations also leave a legacythat tells us something about history andmemory and the meaning we attach to it. Insome cases objects have been witness to orcomplicit in events and as such are a record ofthat event or period.

Certain objects can be considered to bepart of a cultural archive and, in the context ofSouth African history and memory, can have thepotential to remind and act against forgetfulnessabout the past.

Making what I consider to bephotographic portraits of objects, particularlythose that are less common, is another way ofengaging with these concerns and an attemptto make ordinary things meaningful. This bodyof work relates to previous series in that theobjects have personal associations, yet connectwith broader questions about our relationshipto objects that surround us and the context inwhich they exist.

120

Shovel (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

121

Shovel Close-Up (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

122

Rugby Ball (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

123

Tyre (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

124

Telephone Variant (2009)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

125

Primus 1 (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

126

Secateurs (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

127

Shears (2009)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

128

Bits (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

129

Glove (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

130

Supreme Court (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

131

Rhinoceros Skull (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

132

Longboard (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

133

Wildedagga (2011)Hand-painted silver gelatin emulsion on paper

120cm x 107cm

Typology of Place

134 2008 - 2011

135

Typology of Place was developed from a seriesof field trips to the Northern Cape. During thesejourneys, the relationship between the names,regions and visual appearance of different placesbecame a compelling line of enquiry in itself.Attempting to address the idea of place, byrevealing and questioning commonly heldassumptions about land, home and nationalidentity, is the central focus of the project.

The notion of landscape as wilderness,a place of imagination and freedom, conjures apowerful image of psychological liberation andescape from the ideological structures of society.Historically, South Africa has been inscribed bya topographical taxonomy that has spiritual,ideological and colonial meanings andassociations by virtue of the naming process.Recording, describing and mapping thelandscape visually to create a typology can beseen as analogous to using language to assignmeaning to places. Just as hunter-gatherers,pastoralists, trekboers and British settlersassigned particular meaning to places and waysto think about them through naming, so dovisual images of places tell stories that defineour real and imagined lives, and in the processvisually construct meaning.

Many places described on maps, bothhistorical and contemporary, refer to a taxonomyof landscape that may or may not still existbecause of progressive agricultural and socialdevelopment or regional climatic advances. Thisprocess of progression suggests that what mightonce have existed is perhaps no longer present,suggesting a possible dislocation between nameand place.

Another aspect of the work is the wayin which colour can assign identity to place. Theparticular palette of different regions in thelandscape, for example the pale yellow hues ofthe grass and contrasting red earth of theKalahari, could be argued as a signifier of placein the same way that area names assign identity. By linking visual appearance includingcolour with area names as well as objects indeveloping a typology of place, I have tried toimagine a way of seeing that differs fromprevious visions of landscape in South Africa.

136

Road Anysberg, Klein Karoo (2008)Digital print with archival ink on paper

111,8 x 134cm

137

Anysberg l, Klein Karoo (2008)Digital print with archival ink on paper

111,8 x 134cm

138

Anysberg ll, Klein Karoo (2008)Digital print with archival ink on paper

111,8 x 134cm

139

140

Korannaberge, Gordonia (2009)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

141

Sprinbokoog, Kaiingsveld (2010)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

142

Hantam (2011)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

143

Boesmanland (2009)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

144

Bosluis se Pan, Boesmanland (2009)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

145

Rietfontein se Pan, Boesmanland (2011)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

146

Bosduif, Kaaingsveld (2009)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

147

Swartruggens, Ceres Karoo (2010)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

148

Soetanysberg, Rooistrandveld (2010)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

149

Rooistranveld (2010)Digital print with archival ink on paper

80,5 x 111,8cm

150 sean o’toole

A Maker of Images

151

Stephen Inggs in conversation with Sean O’Toole

SO: Your Polaroid series marks your start as apracticing photographer. What attracted you towork with Polaroid? It offers instantaneity butalso comes with defined constraints, like alimited focal range, lack of sharpness and mutedcolouration.

SI: Many of the photographs I was taking at thattime were source material for images inprintmaking; I was working with high-contrastline film, essentially converting photographicimages into printmaking images. Much later,when I realised how much work I was doing inphotography, I began to let the images stand intheir own right, but it took me a long time tocome to that particular understanding. I thinkI’m a printmaker who came to photography witha love of images in print and have continued towork in that way. In many ways I see photographyas a part of printmaking rather than the otherway round, because one is simply making a printwith light. You’re working with chemistry andlight, as opposed to a press, but you’re stillmaking a print, just using a different set oftechnologies. To answer your question, I alwaysloved the materiality of Polaroid. It has amystique, which is something that reallyattracted me to the medium. I also liked the ideaof the unique image, the instant nature of it, andthe fact that it can be manipulated in a numberof different ways, which was unlike film in thosedays where you simply put a roll of film into acamera and only saw the results after the filmwas processed. Transparencies delayed thematerialisation process considerably, in the

sense that once processed they were subject toan edit process, following which the image wassent for scanning and then printed. It is a longwait. Polaroid offered a whole different way ofworking. When I was a student in Durban in thelate 1970s, fine art photography hadn’t yetbecome an acceptance medium in its own right.Nobody was thinking about photography in theway that it was being thought about elsewhereat that time. Even using photographs in theproduction of prints was considered somewhatcontroversial. Anything that involved mechanicalreproduction or photographic process wasviewed with suspicion.

SO: It’s interesting what you say about therelationship between the two disciplines. Towhat extent have your abilities as a printmakerassisted you as a photographer, and, conversely,how has photography benefitted your practiceas a printmaker?

SI: Being a printmaker working as aphotographer you are always aware that one hasto interpret the photographic material intoanother stage, take it into another set ofmaterials, whether it is a photo lithograph,screenprint or etching. That shift in translationbrings about another meaning to the image; thetransition and translation into another materialbrings about another way of seeing. With someof the Polaroids there were defined ideas that Iwas trying to record. They subsequently madetheir way into my first exhibition. My interestwas still very much in print, but my SX-70Polaroids largely informed the prints that I made.A lot of the Polaroids from the 1980s, especially,

152

were made as South Africa was heading towardsa State of Emergency, a time when everythinglooked ominous and had a sinister reading to it.Having done my stint in the military I felt asense of trepidation, which in retrospect I thinkI was trying to reflect in my work. I had justrecently returned from the UK, where I had donea postgraduate diploma in printmaking. I wasuncertain about the future in South Africa andwhat that meant. My interest in signs, a privateproperty notice set in front of an emptylandscape, for example, reflects this.

SO: Your Poetry of Places (1993) series immersesthe viewer in an architectural and urbanexperience of place. Where were you were livingat the time?

SI: On the Atlantic Seaboard. I used to do a lotof walking along the seafront promenade, whereto my mind there is a certain kind of nostalgic,historical feel to the architectural form of thebuildings, also something that echoes manyother cities fronting onto the sea around theworld. I was interested in the work of EdwardHopper at that time and particularly drawn tohis urban landscapes, the absence of humanpresence – humans were implied rather thaninserted as an obvious fact.

SO: It’s interesting that you mention Hopper,especially since there is an unmistakable pointof view operating here, by which I mean youruse of horizontal, vertical and oblique angles. Itis almost inconceivable to think of these sortsof views before Moholy-Nagy or Rodchenko. Howmuch of an influence has classic westernmodernism, especially photographic modernism,

exerted on your imagination? Some SouthAfrican artists seem to rely entirely on it forquotations.

SI: At art school modernism was thepredominant paradigm, so it was an influence,whether conscious or not, and definitely informsthe production of my work.

SO: The series includes some works in whichthe linear qualities of the architecture isdistorted. Can you talk a bit more about theseparticular works?

SI: I was working on source material for thisseries and had dropped off a roll of black andwhite film at the lab to be processed. Somethingin the process went completely haywire, resultingin the emulsion lifting away from the film base,leaving a broken, distorted image. Initially I wasquite annoyed, but then I suddenly thought itwas amazing because it highlighted the materialnature of the photographic process. I decided touse the film to make a series of prints. I thinkwhat intrigued me was the fact that light-sensitive emulsion is really only a thinmembrane that adheres to a substrate, be it film,paper or whatever. I started investigating thisidea further and it led me to work with lightsensitive emulsion on paper, which I used in mynext series looking at overlooked objects.

SO: Stanford Series takes shape aroundfragments of 19th-century ceramics excavatedat your house in Stanford. What intrigued youabout the objects, intrigued you enough to wantto photograph them?

153

SI: On one level it was interest in collecting thatdrew me to them. In and of themselves, thefragments were too small to do anything with,so I felt the need to examine them more closely,make them larger in my own mind.

SO: Compared to your earlier photographic work,where you are very much a shy urban voyeur,your latter work, starting with the Stanford

Series, demonstrates the precision of a scientist.Would you accept this analysis?

SI: Yes, I think that is a fair comment. The objectshad a jewel-like presence but the real challengewas how to evoke that in a photograph. I decidedto photograph them on a black velvet backdropbecause it absorbs light and doesn’t reflect – itis the ultimate black ground. I had also justrecently bought a new camera, a used MamiyaRZ67 medium-format single-lens reflex camera,which I spotted in the window of a photographicshop on Long Street. The beauty of thisparticular camera is that it’s really a box; it’sthree-sided and you put a prism on top, a lens inthe front and any one of a variety of backs. Frommy experience working in fashion photography,I knew that many professionals like PatrickDemarchelier and Annie Leibovitz were usingone too. The RZ gave one a certain amount offlexibility, unlike a 4” x 5” view camera, whichis much more painstaking to set up. The RZlenses also have particularly good optics andare razor sharp. I had recently built a daylightstudio at home, modelled along the lines ofIrving Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room (1974)with South-facing natural light. Penn’s projectintrigued me on two levels: firstly the

anthropological approach, but also the qualityof the natural light. It was astonishing to mehow he could achieve that kind of subtlety oflight, something that wasn’t a concern in a lotof photography. The painterly quality of Penn’suse of light really inspired me to try and achievea magical quality of light in my work.

SO: One of Penn’s achievements is how heforegrounds his subjects through simple deviceslike white backdrops.

SI: Yes, and similarly the black backdrop, in mycase, was an important element in this series,because I wanted to take the objects out of thetypical photographic frame. I was interested inthe conventions of the photographic still life,removing the objects from their context. I didn’twant the viewer to be looking through a window.I quite liked the idea of these things coming outof the darkness. If you show something on ablack background there’s no context any longerand you are forced to look at the object in adifferent kind of way. Making the object muchbigger, exaggerating its scale, also allowed meto engage with it differently. I was reading arthistorian and theorist Norman Bryson at thetime, and particularly liked his ideas aroundstill life being concerned with the small,incidental things in life, as opposed to a grandnarrative. But, and this goes back to somethingI said earlier, I also enjoyed the idea of workingwith an instant negative, so that if you wantedto make any kind of correction or adjustmentyou could do it right there and then. It wasn’t acase of waiting until the film got back from thelab and you’ve already forgotten about that

154

image and it is a re-connection with what you’vedone. This way of working was immediate andquite strongly process-driven. Once the printhas been made it very much exists as an objectin and of itself – more than just an image. I thinkvery often photography just exists as an image,as dematerialised things printed in a magazine,book or on the web. For me the idea of aphotograph having a physical presence in thesame way that an artwork has a physicalpresence is appealing.

SO: In art historical terms, your work from thisperiod onwards demonstrates a strong interestin the genre of still life. What about this genreappeals to you?

SI: I think the idea of overlooked objectsappealed to me. For me, objects, particularly oldobjects which are worn and have been used andhad a function previous, retain a history andhave the ability to trigger some kind of responsein terms of memory. Whatever one might thinkabout them, others will apply different readings.Particularly in a South African context, one canlook at certain things and associate them witha particular past. For me this series is importantbecause it also marked the start of what is anongoing interest: typology, how we understandthings in relationship to one another. I have apreference for very singular objects, although Ihave occasionally extended beyond that. Forexample, in my Solitude series I photographeda diary written by a farmer’s wife in 1904 wherethe edges of the page extend beyond the frameof the photograph. Although I find 17th-CenturyDutch and Spanish still life painting intriguing,

I’m not that interested in constructing andstaging an image in that way. It’s not really anarea of interest for me.

SO: The domestic objects in the Continuum

series of work prompt a defined reading, as dothe clock and two dead animals. To what extentdo you want the images you portray to be readas metaphoric rather than factual?

SI: I want elements of both, although I wouldpersonally probably lean more towards ametaphoric rather than a factual reading.

SO: Polaroids are small. Did the change to alarger substrate ever prompt any hesitation?

SI: No! I’ll tell you why. While on sabbatical inthe USA just before I started working on thisseries I was lucky to see a Jasper Johns printretrospective at MoMA. It was an absolutelywonderful show and inspirational for me onmany levels. The complexity and scale of hisprints blew me away – I had never before seenprints that could compete with paintings. WhenI returned to Cape Town I set myself thechallenge of making my work bigger.

SO: Did the larger scale arouse interest amongstyour audience?

SI: Yes. Often when people first see my work(emulsion prints) they are uncertain as to whatthey are – if they are prints, photographs,paintings or drawings. They can be difficult toidentify technologically because they haveelements of all those mediums. The first prints

155

that I made in the series weren’t as technicallydeveloped and often I worked on them withdrawing because of what I couldn’t get out ofthe process at the time.

SO: There is an obvious relationship betweenthe trilogy Continuum, Sensum and Residuum.Sensum reads like an obvious extension of yourContinuum series, with domestic objects figuredin great detail. Yet, when you see Residuum yourealise that it pre-empts your more recent work.What made you decide to allow context and thelandscape to flood your Residuum series?

SI: I started to ask myself how I could make animage of an object in a context, but not in theconventional sense of the photographic frame.One day while driving around on the back roadsof Stanford looking for images, I noticed a fencepost with wires tightly bound around it. Herewas an object in a landscape that I was interestedin trying to portray as a tree trunk, not a fencepost, but present it in a way where the contextwas not too specific as to overtly prescribe howthe viewer should read it as an image.

SO: The groups of trophies and wooden pegsremind me of your bottle caps that appear inContinuum. In your view, what does multitudeoffer that we won’t see in a singular image?Relationship is an obvious answer, but is thereany other reason for adopting this approach tocomposition?

SI: I think what interests me is not whether theobjects are presented as singular or multiple,but the act of collection itself. I identify with

how Walker Evans often photographed what hecollected. It’s another way of looking at objectsthat have been collected, for whatever reason,because one has a particular response to themin that context. I like the idea of wooden tentpegs, for example, making a reference tolandscape without being in the landscape itself.I’m much more interested in making an imagethan I am in simply capturing the image.

SO: The semi-arid landscapes of South Africa,particularly the Karoo, have drawn many artistsand photographers to depict them. Was thereany particular set of characteristics that drewyou to image this landscape?

SI: This series was prefaced by research andexperimentation. I read Olive Schreiner’saccount of the Karoo in her novel The Story of

an African Farm (1883) and also tried to immersemyself, imaginatively, in the history of the Karoo,as it was both then and millions of years agowhen it was an inland sea. Although many ideasfiltered into the work, some images, however,are triggered by specific incidents. For example,driving in the Northern Cape recently I cameacross a wind pump – I find them fascinating –this one was not any more remarkable than anyother, but what did intrigue me was its shadow,the projection of the structure onto thelandscape, which was far more interesting thanthe actual object itself. I continued driving fora while thinking about it, then stopped, droveback and photographed the shadow.

SO: You’ve mentioned Schreiner, but were thereany artists who worked in the Karoo – or in

156

similar environments elsewhere – that perhapsinterested you?

SI: Yes, I was thinking about equivalents. AnselAdams in Yosemite might be an example. I thinkthat there is something incredible about beingin a very primitive landscape like the Karoobecause it does have this huge pre-history. Itdoesn’t seem to have changed all thatsignificantly – there are a few farms, but it islargely uninhabited, a vast solitude. It iswilderness, a frontier where you can imagineyourself in all sorts of ways.

SO: Despite one or two nominally abstractpictures in the Strandveld series – thephotographs of the clouds in this series, or yourseascape in the Solitude series – you areindubitably a figurative photographer. You figureverifiable subjects: phones, scissors, measuringtapes, propellers, stones. Unless one takes timeto speak with you and find out about therelationship between these objects, theirrelationship can appear quite cryptic, theirmeaning discrete rather than collective.

SI: When I started working on the landscapeseries I wanted to engage place much more; itwasn’t singularly about a set of objects recordedphotographically. I was trying to develop atypology of place. What emerged, and it is stillformulating itself, is this idea of naming inrelation to a landscape, be it evidence of humanhabitation or intervention. When early travellerscame to South Africa they tried to claimownership and power over the land, of whichthere are many traces. J. M. Coetzee has written

about this subject, about the desire amongst,particularly, white South Africans to find alanguage to fit Africa, a language that could beauthentically African. The quest for an authenticlanguage is pursued within a framework inwhich language, consciousness and landscapeare interrelated. I find this interesting. As anartist with an interest in landscape andoverlooked objects, I am working towardscreating my own authentic interpretation –rather than language – of the South Africanlandscape.

SO: Colour is an obvious point of departure inyour recent series, Typology of Place, but I’d liketo start by remarking on your anti-iconicevocation of this landscape. These arequintessentially anti-romantic studies.

SI: Yes.

SO: I remember William Kentridge telling methat it was only when he had reconciled himselfto the fact that Johannesburg is ugly and it isnot the European landscape that he was able todraw it.

SI: That’s a point worth noting, because muchof the South African landscape is not beautifulin the romantic sense; it’s actually quite harshand barren, which interests me. Can one findsomething in that? Can one find a way ofimaginatively evoking it? That’s the challenge.

SO: You’ve returned to colour after many years.Was it difficult working with colour again?

157

SI: This is an interesting question because oftwo things that happened. One relates to themateriality of making: the 665 film that I havebeen using was discontinued in 2006. At thetime I bought up a whole lot of remaining stockbut eventually that’s coming to an end. Thishappened in the context of the advent of digitalphotography and processes. In 2009, I bought aCanon 5D digital SLR, which in some ways islike going back to 35mm photography. It is amuch easier format to work with because of itsportability and it’s facilitated a transition backinto colour.

SO: Was this series made using a digital camera?

SI: Some images in the series were shot on film– Kodak Portra 160NC. It’s not that I eschewdigital processes – I am now working with AdobePhotoshop Lightroom, a photo management andediting software package that allows you toestablish your work in collections – but I don’tnecessarily see digital images as being an endproduct, not in the way some photographers doby abdicating the print process to a lab or masterprinter. I like the materiality of print, thephysical investment it requires coating paperand then dragging it down to the darkroom.There’s a lot of effort in this sort of making. Isuppose the making aspect in the production ofart is very important for me.

SO: A final question. Polaroid is now effectivelya defunct technology and film is pretty much aspecialist medium. Artistic practice, to be vitaland meaningful, has to adapt to newtechnologies. Given the arc of your photographic

career, from working with Polaroid to nowmaking photographs using digital technology –I think specifically of your 17-metre, digitallycomposited panoramic landscape that youinstalled at the South African Museum inNovember 2010 – change is not something thatyou resist.

SI: Not at all, it doesn’t worry me in the least. Infact, I welcome it because it forces me to changeand grow as an artist too.

SEAN O’TOOLE

is a journalist and writer based in Cape Town

This is an edited transcript of two interviews conducted

at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, July 17

and November 4, 2010.

158

ReferencesAugé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

Benjamin, Walter. 1979. Illuminations. London: Fontana.

Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard. 1999. ReMediation - Understanding New Media. Cambridge,Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Bryson, Norman. 1990. Looking at the Overlooked. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress.

Golden, Thelma. 2001. Art:21 - Art in the Twenty-First Century, Volume 1. New York: Harry N.Abrams.

Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages Of Art: An Approach To A Theory Of Symbols. 2nd ed.Indianapolis: Hackett.

Krauss, Rosalind. 2008. Notes on the Index: Part 1 in Kriebel, Sabine. 2008. In Elkins, J. Photography

Theory: The Art Seminar. New York: Routledge.

Kriebel, Sabine. 2008. In Elkins, J. Photography Theory: The Art Seminar. New York: Routledge.

Neef, Sonja; van Dijck, José; Ketelaar, Eric; Ketelaar, F. C. J. 2006. Sign Here!: Handwriting in the

Age of New Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Pearce, Susan M. 1994. Interpreting Objects and Collections. London and New York: Routledge.

Rubidge, Bruce. 2009. “The Karoo, A Geological And Palaeontological Superlative: EconomicPotential of deep history”. Participation in Interprovincial Conference on Creative Tourism in the

Karoo. Implication for 2010 and beyond. Gariep. Invited Paper.

Sadowski, Piotr. 2009. “The Iconic Indexicality of Photography”. Paper delivered at The Seventh

Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, Toronto, 9-14 June 2009.

Stafford, Barbara, Maria. 2001. Visual Analogy – Consciousness as the Art of Connecting.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

AcknowledgementsMy sincere thanks and appreciation go to all who have made this book possible,especially friends, colleagues and family:

Garth Walker, Virginia MacKenny, Sean O’Toole, Nigel Warburton, Marcus Bury,Vanessa Inggs, Fritha Langerman, Pippa Skotnes, Russell Jones, André van Wyk,Daryll Pienaar, Natasha Norman and Andrea Steer.

Grateful acknowledgement for funding from:

The National Research FoundationUniversity of Cape Town

159

This book was published on the occasion of Stephen Inggs’ exhibition Legacy in a limited edition of 500 copies:400 softcover100 hardcover, 25 in a collector’s edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,without the permission of the publisher or copyright holders.

© 2011 The copyright of each essay rests with each individual author as credited.© All Artwork and photographs – Stephen Inggs

Published byMichaelis School of Fine Art31-37 Orange StreetGardensCape Town 8001South Africa

Designed by Garth WalkerProduction by Scan ShopPrinting by Hansa PressBinding by GraphiCraft

ISBN number: 978-0-620-51872-7

Printed and bound in South Africa

In memory of my father Donald Inggs, family photographer,Leica devotee, and the one who started me on my journey.

stephen inggs was born in Cape Town in 1955 and grew up inJohannesburg, London and Umbogintwini on the South coast ofKwa-Zulu Natal. He studied Fine Art in Durban at TechnikonNatal , where he was awarded the Emma Smith Scholarship foroverseas study, Brighton Polytechnic and the University of Natalin Pietermaritzburg where he completed an MA(FA) degree.

In 1985, Inggs joined the Michaelis School of Fine Artat the University of Cape Town where he is now an AssociateProfessor and Director of the School. He regularly holds soloexhibitions of his creative work in London, Cape Town andJohannesburg. His work has been included in numerousinternational group exhibitions and he was a prize-winner atthe International Print Triennial in Krakow, Poland in 2003.

Inggs has also curated numerous print portfolios,produced and published an artists’ book on the art and techniqueof lithography and co-convened the 3rd Impact InternationalPrintmaking Conference in 2003. His work is held in private andpublic collections locally and abroad including Iziko SouthAfrican National Gallery, Durban Art Gallery, University of CapeTown, Northwestern University, RMB, MTN, Sanlam, Liberty andStandard Bank, the Library of Congress and the Museum ofAfrican Art at the Smithsonian, Ralph Lauren and Takashimaya.