A little late I am with this one, but here it is--cute and fun for the whole family.
also, my lack of (decent) photos can be attributed to Boswell's No-Camera Policy. After I had taken about ten, sneaky pics, a man with a straggly pony tail and squinty eyes appeared out of nowhere and told me to "zip it or dip it." I'm not sure what he was threatening to dip my camera in, but I doubt it was fondue.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
ink, don't blink: The Graffiti of Khwezi
Khwezi Mphatlalatsane has roots in South Africa, Swaziland, and here in Botswana. His name is Xhosa—not Tswana—and if it reminds you of the word, crazy, then you’re onto something. I wouldn’t describe Khwezi as insane, reckless, or unaware. In fact, he has a voracious appetite for visual observation, cultural knowledge and linguistic wit. He’s socially clever, taking a leadership role in most group situations, and like many self-learners, he likes to show-off his ingenuity. If Khwezi seems crazy, however, it’s less because of what he does and more because of how he does it.
Khwezi is a showman. Everything he does—and he does a lot—seems ready to be consumed for an audience. He seeks to master MCing, DJing, and Graffing, three of the four “elements” of hip hop culture. Along with two friends, Khwezi is almost finished recording an album under the name, People of Religious Nature, or P.O.R.N. And such contradictory nomenclature—however sophomoric—is a distinctive mark of Khwezi’s aesthetic.
His Graffiti tag is, “ink,” often followed by the catchphrase, “Don’t Blink.” When I asked him what this meant and how he came up with the idea, he replied, “It’s ink. Yah know, ink, bitch. INK, don't blink!” And despite his enrollment in Gaborone’s school for fine arts and media work, Limkokwing University, he asserts that his identity is derived from roots in the neighborhood of Partial, which he describes as, “a ghetto within a suburb.”
Khwezi has a slangy and unique sense of language. Describing an American Southern accent, he used the phrase, “deep and hectic.” He speaks of cultural dissection as using his “forensic ear and eye.” Setswana and English roll off of his tongue like ball bearings, and I’ve counted at least six different words—all Khwezi’s inventions—that he uses to talk about marijuana.
After approaching the National Museum of Botswana several times regarding their diversity of art, they finally agreed to let him come paint a mural. He maintains that the curators should focus more on local street artists, so he along with Ngozi Chukura, a fellow member of P.O.R.N., gladly jumped at the commission. He hopes that this is the first step in building a relationship with members of the more “elite,” artist community in Gaborone.
The fourth element of hip hop is break dancing, but Khwezi, tall and sinewy, leaves the pops, locks, and acrobatics out of his act. His quick moves and rhythmic gestures are reserved for the dark walls and corners of Gaborone. He does his best work when no one is looking, and with flicks of the wrist, the triggered release of paint, and a dashing eye that looks at both the cinder-block canvas and the surrounding environment, Khwezi leaves his mark the city. Always trying to innovate his designs, style, and location, Khwezi is one of Gaborone’s most prominent graff artists. To know the city’s appearance is to know his work.
ISO 200 17mm f/6.3 1/125 sec
I chose this image to begin the series because it is representative of much of Khwezi’s work. To the left is his tag, ink, which he punctuates with the copyright symbol. When I asked him about the irony in his assertion of property rights while infringing on another’s, he didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at. Whether he’s aware of it or not, Khwezi’s work is imbued with the inherent ethical debate surrounding the medium. He seems to be unintentionally mocking it without engaging in it, and I'm not sure if this is charming or infuriating?
On the right is another common motif in Khwezi’s pieces—a bug-eyed face grinning demonically. Khwezi is a nice and (usually) calm guy, but he often makes similar expressions that are larger-than-life. His animation seems to imitate his animation. In this photograph I included the tree, trying to make the shack into an imitation of the face painted on it. As Khwezi often repeats, “life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates...”
ISO 1600 17mm f / 2.8 1/25 sec
The lighting wasn’t strong under this awning, located inside a building at the Main Mall, so I boosted my ISO, opened my aperture all the way, and tried to keep a steady hand with the slow shutter speed.
I composed this while thinking about the repetition of the man’s angry, green face juxtaposed with the red, sterile, no-smoking sign. If ever there were a semiotic face-off between rebellious street art and authoritarian street etiquette, this is it.
ISO 1600 17mm f / 2.8 1/50 sec
This shot is explicitly about the environment in which Khwezi chose to place his work. The architecture of this staircase, leading up to the restaurant and poetry bar, Khwest, is loud and full of distracting curves and angles. The wide-angle view is mildly disorienting, which keeps a viewer’s eye entertained and engaged. I wanted to reflect the subtlety of Khwezi’s work, located in the bottom-right of the image, by stacking the building on top of it, and in this sense, his tag becomes a solid foundation for the cacophony above.
ISO 200 30 mm f / 4.0 1/40 sec
The lighting was sharp when we arrived at this tag, located on the southern side of the Standard Chartered at the Main Mall. I faced it directly, trying to compose the shot with attention to Khwezi’s bleeding stencil interacting with the crisp, Helvetica of the bank’s name.
I left the photograph slightly tilted, weighing the viewer’s eye toward Khwezi’s unforgiving blemish upon this financial institution. P.O.R.N., the acronym for his music group, People of Religious Nature, seems to be mocking the static and truncated, “Stand-” and “Charte-.”
ISO 200 19 mm f / 2.8 1/30 sec
This picture is a close-up of the previous tag. I wanted to show the texture of the surface on which Khwezi stenciled. Using a wide aperture and focal length, I was able to get close, keeping the entire stencil in frame and achieve the narrow depth of field that draws a viewer’s eyes to the porous metal. If you looks closely, you can see that the spray paint clogged up some of the holes, and even though I was there and already did, it makes me want to reach out and feel the texture.
ISO 400 17 mm f / 2.8 1/8 sec
I tend to rely on my wide-angle lens too much, but I can’t help how attracted I am to vanishing points and foreshortened perspective. For being so close to this scene (excluding the cars in the background) the photo still has a sense of depth and movement. Khwezi’s crude and gestured lines draw the focus from the bottom-left to the top-right, just as the gold/white color scheme of the environment moves from the top-left to the bottom-right. This compositional and hue-oriented balance, combined with the slow shutter speed, makes the griminess of this image feel strangely comfortable. Hug trash much?
ISO 1600 17 mm f / 2.8 ¼ sec
Again, I find myself using a wide angle and a fully dilated aperture. This time, however, the photograph was taken in the dark, and I was maximizing the amount of light that entered my lens and struck my camera’s digital sensor. With a ¼ sec-long exposure, I had to take a deep breath, dig my elbows into my ribs, and search for that transient moment of meditation while the shutter flew open.
The Moon is the white light on the left, the incandescent street-lamp is on the right, and after a couple takes, I got the smeared light trails of a car going down this quiet road through Gaborone’s Block 9 district. This photo, I hope, is less about Khwezi’s tag and more about one’s situational encounter with it.
ISO 1600 17mm f / 5.0 1/80 sec
I’m almost embarrassed by how brash this photo is, and I only include it because it reveals something crucial about Khwezi: he is a performer. When we came upon this tag—painted with a reflective silver tone—I attached my flash and began illuminating the scene. Khwezi proceeded to pop some wheelies with his offensively-neon-red bike. (Okay, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enamored with the hyper-dynamism of the shot.)
All the same, Khwezi, who is cruising down that daunting hill known as one’s second decade, makes a funny site atop that one wheel. If there’s any doubt as to where his creative soul is leading him in this moment, look at the words and arrows directly beneath the tag.
ISO 1600 17mm f / 2.8 ¼ sec
There was little-to-none ambient light when we arrived at this piece, located on someone’s backyard wall in Block 9. I asked Khwezi to shine his flashlight—a halogen—on the tag. While I wanted to treat his work like a cleanly-lit spectacle on a stage, I also wanted to let its environment creep into the photograph. The encroaching weeds on the bottom serve two purposes: they cut the composition in two and provide some context for this piece’s geography. Khwezi had to get close to the ground and off the beaten path to spray this. When I asked him about choosing his locations, Khwezi explained that it’s important to find somewhere that’s both covert and frequently seen. In this regard, Graffiti is one of the few mediums where the canvas is sometimes more important than the paint.
ISO 1600 25 mm f / 3.5 ¼ sec
This Photo is primarily a product of white balancing. Like the other photos taken at night, I was using a long shutter speed with a wide aperture and high ISO, trying to give my camera the right parameters to soak in the light. With Khwezi shining his halogen lamp on the stencil—which depicts a mo-hawked punk—my camera misread the incandescent streetlights as being much more orange-red than they actually appear to the human eye.
ISO 800 17 mm f / 3.5 1/25 sec
Khwezi walks past one of the murals he painted at The National Museum of Botswana, located in City Center. The murals were part of a new exhibit showcasing the various instruments and musical traditions that come from Botswana. As it was a commissioned piece, Khwezi painted this over a drawing that was projected onto the wall. An art director at the museum drew the original sketch, and though Khwezi hoped to show-off his personal work, he considers this only the first of many opportunities to showcase his talent.
By shooting at a low shutter speed, I caught his arm swinging by his piece, either waving at or dismissing it.
ISO 100 50 mm f / 3.2 1/1600 sec
Khwezi shows off some of his sketches and scribbling. His comic character shows through in all his work, and can be felt in his precise, yet playful, renderings.
I chose to use a shallow depth of field in order to draw the viewer’s attention to the upper-left corner, where Khwezi seems to be drawing either his own image or that of a fellow graffer.
ISO 100 50 mm f / 5.6 1/500 sec
The sun was pretty strong where we chose to go through Khwezi’s sketchpads, so I was able to lower my ISO and get a lot of detail in this shot. I also switched to my 50mm lens, as it tends to make colors more crisp than my 17-70mm. I chose to position Khwezi’s fingers in the shot and angled toward the drawn figure in order to fill some negative space, give the image a sense of scale, and bring attention to the minute and precise work that an artist’s hands can achieve.
ISO 100 44mm f / 9.0 1/250 sec
Located on the basketball courts in the park situated between the University and the Main Mall, this green wall is slowly being engulfed by Khwezi's paint. The order of his work is evident; he made another bug-eyed "don't blink" face and then the personified spray-paint can—again with a bulging stare. Then there are the blue lines, words (both in English and Setswana), and figures coming from the can itself, as if the writer’s creation took over. There are two different stencils painted on the wall, one of a bubbly face and three of a right-angled sumo wrestler. Finally, Khwezi sloppily slapped on his "ink," tag and left the court, game over.
I placed my f-stop reasonably high in order to keep the fencing in the foreground in-focus. This reaffirms a viewer's sense of an urban environment, and at the same time, the wire remind the viewer, that graffiti is an art form predicated on transgressing boundaries. Khwezi, it seems, never forgets that tenet.
Khwezi is a showman. Everything he does—and he does a lot—seems ready to be consumed for an audience. He seeks to master MCing, DJing, and Graffing, three of the four “elements” of hip hop culture. Along with two friends, Khwezi is almost finished recording an album under the name, People of Religious Nature, or P.O.R.N. And such contradictory nomenclature—however sophomoric—is a distinctive mark of Khwezi’s aesthetic.
His Graffiti tag is, “ink,” often followed by the catchphrase, “Don’t Blink.” When I asked him what this meant and how he came up with the idea, he replied, “It’s ink. Yah know, ink, bitch. INK, don't blink!” And despite his enrollment in Gaborone’s school for fine arts and media work, Limkokwing University, he asserts that his identity is derived from roots in the neighborhood of Partial, which he describes as, “a ghetto within a suburb.”
Khwezi has a slangy and unique sense of language. Describing an American Southern accent, he used the phrase, “deep and hectic.” He speaks of cultural dissection as using his “forensic ear and eye.” Setswana and English roll off of his tongue like ball bearings, and I’ve counted at least six different words—all Khwezi’s inventions—that he uses to talk about marijuana.
After approaching the National Museum of Botswana several times regarding their diversity of art, they finally agreed to let him come paint a mural. He maintains that the curators should focus more on local street artists, so he along with Ngozi Chukura, a fellow member of P.O.R.N., gladly jumped at the commission. He hopes that this is the first step in building a relationship with members of the more “elite,” artist community in Gaborone.
The fourth element of hip hop is break dancing, but Khwezi, tall and sinewy, leaves the pops, locks, and acrobatics out of his act. His quick moves and rhythmic gestures are reserved for the dark walls and corners of Gaborone. He does his best work when no one is looking, and with flicks of the wrist, the triggered release of paint, and a dashing eye that looks at both the cinder-block canvas and the surrounding environment, Khwezi leaves his mark the city. Always trying to innovate his designs, style, and location, Khwezi is one of Gaborone’s most prominent graff artists. To know the city’s appearance is to know his work.
ISO 200 17mm f/6.3 1/125 secI chose this image to begin the series because it is representative of much of Khwezi’s work. To the left is his tag, ink, which he punctuates with the copyright symbol. When I asked him about the irony in his assertion of property rights while infringing on another’s, he didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at. Whether he’s aware of it or not, Khwezi’s work is imbued with the inherent ethical debate surrounding the medium. He seems to be unintentionally mocking it without engaging in it, and I'm not sure if this is charming or infuriating?
On the right is another common motif in Khwezi’s pieces—a bug-eyed face grinning demonically. Khwezi is a nice and (usually) calm guy, but he often makes similar expressions that are larger-than-life. His animation seems to imitate his animation. In this photograph I included the tree, trying to make the shack into an imitation of the face painted on it. As Khwezi often repeats, “life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates...”
ISO 1600 17mm f / 2.8 1/25 secThe lighting wasn’t strong under this awning, located inside a building at the Main Mall, so I boosted my ISO, opened my aperture all the way, and tried to keep a steady hand with the slow shutter speed.
I composed this while thinking about the repetition of the man’s angry, green face juxtaposed with the red, sterile, no-smoking sign. If ever there were a semiotic face-off between rebellious street art and authoritarian street etiquette, this is it.
ISO 1600 17mm f / 2.8 1/50 secThis shot is explicitly about the environment in which Khwezi chose to place his work. The architecture of this staircase, leading up to the restaurant and poetry bar, Khwest, is loud and full of distracting curves and angles. The wide-angle view is mildly disorienting, which keeps a viewer’s eye entertained and engaged. I wanted to reflect the subtlety of Khwezi’s work, located in the bottom-right of the image, by stacking the building on top of it, and in this sense, his tag becomes a solid foundation for the cacophony above.
ISO 200 30 mm f / 4.0 1/40 sec
The lighting was sharp when we arrived at this tag, located on the southern side of the Standard Chartered at the Main Mall. I faced it directly, trying to compose the shot with attention to Khwezi’s bleeding stencil interacting with the crisp, Helvetica of the bank’s name.
I left the photograph slightly tilted, weighing the viewer’s eye toward Khwezi’s unforgiving blemish upon this financial institution. P.O.R.N., the acronym for his music group, People of Religious Nature, seems to be mocking the static and truncated, “Stand-” and “Charte-.”
ISO 200 19 mm f / 2.8 1/30 secThis picture is a close-up of the previous tag. I wanted to show the texture of the surface on which Khwezi stenciled. Using a wide aperture and focal length, I was able to get close, keeping the entire stencil in frame and achieve the narrow depth of field that draws a viewer’s eyes to the porous metal. If you looks closely, you can see that the spray paint clogged up some of the holes, and even though I was there and already did, it makes me want to reach out and feel the texture.
ISO 400 17 mm f / 2.8 1/8 secI tend to rely on my wide-angle lens too much, but I can’t help how attracted I am to vanishing points and foreshortened perspective. For being so close to this scene (excluding the cars in the background) the photo still has a sense of depth and movement. Khwezi’s crude and gestured lines draw the focus from the bottom-left to the top-right, just as the gold/white color scheme of the environment moves from the top-left to the bottom-right. This compositional and hue-oriented balance, combined with the slow shutter speed, makes the griminess of this image feel strangely comfortable. Hug trash much?
ISO 1600 17 mm f / 2.8 ¼ secAgain, I find myself using a wide angle and a fully dilated aperture. This time, however, the photograph was taken in the dark, and I was maximizing the amount of light that entered my lens and struck my camera’s digital sensor. With a ¼ sec-long exposure, I had to take a deep breath, dig my elbows into my ribs, and search for that transient moment of meditation while the shutter flew open.
The Moon is the white light on the left, the incandescent street-lamp is on the right, and after a couple takes, I got the smeared light trails of a car going down this quiet road through Gaborone’s Block 9 district. This photo, I hope, is less about Khwezi’s tag and more about one’s situational encounter with it.
ISO 1600 17mm f / 5.0 1/80 secI’m almost embarrassed by how brash this photo is, and I only include it because it reveals something crucial about Khwezi: he is a performer. When we came upon this tag—painted with a reflective silver tone—I attached my flash and began illuminating the scene. Khwezi proceeded to pop some wheelies with his offensively-neon-red bike. (Okay, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enamored with the hyper-dynamism of the shot.)
All the same, Khwezi, who is cruising down that daunting hill known as one’s second decade, makes a funny site atop that one wheel. If there’s any doubt as to where his creative soul is leading him in this moment, look at the words and arrows directly beneath the tag.
ISO 1600 17mm f / 2.8 ¼ secThere was little-to-none ambient light when we arrived at this piece, located on someone’s backyard wall in Block 9. I asked Khwezi to shine his flashlight—a halogen—on the tag. While I wanted to treat his work like a cleanly-lit spectacle on a stage, I also wanted to let its environment creep into the photograph. The encroaching weeds on the bottom serve two purposes: they cut the composition in two and provide some context for this piece’s geography. Khwezi had to get close to the ground and off the beaten path to spray this. When I asked him about choosing his locations, Khwezi explained that it’s important to find somewhere that’s both covert and frequently seen. In this regard, Graffiti is one of the few mediums where the canvas is sometimes more important than the paint.
ISO 1600 25 mm f / 3.5 ¼ secThis Photo is primarily a product of white balancing. Like the other photos taken at night, I was using a long shutter speed with a wide aperture and high ISO, trying to give my camera the right parameters to soak in the light. With Khwezi shining his halogen lamp on the stencil—which depicts a mo-hawked punk—my camera misread the incandescent streetlights as being much more orange-red than they actually appear to the human eye.
ISO 800 17 mm f / 3.5 1/25 secKhwezi walks past one of the murals he painted at The National Museum of Botswana, located in City Center. The murals were part of a new exhibit showcasing the various instruments and musical traditions that come from Botswana. As it was a commissioned piece, Khwezi painted this over a drawing that was projected onto the wall. An art director at the museum drew the original sketch, and though Khwezi hoped to show-off his personal work, he considers this only the first of many opportunities to showcase his talent.
By shooting at a low shutter speed, I caught his arm swinging by his piece, either waving at or dismissing it.
ISO 100 50 mm f / 3.2 1/1600 secKhwezi shows off some of his sketches and scribbling. His comic character shows through in all his work, and can be felt in his precise, yet playful, renderings.
I chose to use a shallow depth of field in order to draw the viewer’s attention to the upper-left corner, where Khwezi seems to be drawing either his own image or that of a fellow graffer.
ISO 100 50 mm f / 5.6 1/500 secThe sun was pretty strong where we chose to go through Khwezi’s sketchpads, so I was able to lower my ISO and get a lot of detail in this shot. I also switched to my 50mm lens, as it tends to make colors more crisp than my 17-70mm. I chose to position Khwezi’s fingers in the shot and angled toward the drawn figure in order to fill some negative space, give the image a sense of scale, and bring attention to the minute and precise work that an artist’s hands can achieve.
ISO 100 44mm f / 9.0 1/250 secLocated on the basketball courts in the park situated between the University and the Main Mall, this green wall is slowly being engulfed by Khwezi's paint. The order of his work is evident; he made another bug-eyed "don't blink" face and then the personified spray-paint can—again with a bulging stare. Then there are the blue lines, words (both in English and Setswana), and figures coming from the can itself, as if the writer’s creation took over. There are two different stencils painted on the wall, one of a bubbly face and three of a right-angled sumo wrestler. Finally, Khwezi sloppily slapped on his "ink," tag and left the court, game over.
I placed my f-stop reasonably high in order to keep the fencing in the foreground in-focus. This reaffirms a viewer's sense of an urban environment, and at the same time, the wire remind the viewer, that graffiti is an art form predicated on transgressing boundaries. Khwezi, it seems, never forgets that tenet.
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