Unlabelled Magazine editorial has decided that a photographic project titled ‘Native Work’ by Andrew Putter is worth putting up on their site, without questioning the merits of. Then they went on to delete my comment on how fucked up that is on their Instagram account.

Putter’s project, ‘Native Work’, is based on Duggan-Cronin’s racist work ‘The Bantu Tribes of South Africa’, 1919-1939. Which Putter says had a ‘impulse of tenderness’. A white photographer finding ‘tenderness’ in a clearly racist anthropological work.

In its introduction, Unlabelled Magazine writes, ‘’Native Work’ holds significance not only as part of an archive and representation of a tribal group...a perspective on the troubled legacy of apartheid South Africa”. Stop the fucking lorry bruv. Wtf?

One of the photographs is titled ‘Native Maiden’. I give up. Unlabelled Magazine?

“The desire of social solidarity” says Putter. Which part? The part where white photographers want to work through their whiteness, racist, privilege, by rounding up blck bodies, dressing them up, posing and framing them as some means to work through issues.

“Hi. I'm Andrew. I'm a white, gay, racist South African who was born at the height of apartheid (in 1965), and grew up in Pinelands, a middle-class, racially segregated suburb of Cape Town.” He says.

Here’s this deplorable piece, which Unlabelled Magazine has published. Strangely, re-reading it, I’m hit with a sense that it’s been edited and chopped, since my comment. Bits I remember missing. https://www.unlabelledmagazine.com/post/native-work-by-andrew-putter-inspired-by-the-desire-for-social-solidarity

Bits they cut out: things Putter said.

“So intense were these changes that even my dreams began to change: one night I dreamt that I was black."

Original text of the project. Ah, please Putter and his thinking. Outrageous stuff.

http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-01902012000100012