By John Woodford

"Many photographers from outside South Africa show up in places like this to shoot flashpoints--negative moments in the society--and that is their justification for seeking a particular image," says School of Art and Design Prof. Edward West, as he selects photographs of a rural community for a March exhibition in South Africa. "But if you remove that journalistic moment of confrontation, violence or death, then what you meet there are communities of people with a positive drive in life even if they are in poverty. In fact, they are incredibly generous despite circumstances that might suggest otherwise."

The exhibition he was preparing, "Around Alice," is a novel form he devised. He calls it a "Take-Away Show," since subjects in the photos may take possession of their images after the show has run. The U-M, the University of Fort Hare and Business Arts South Africa are cosponsoring the show.

Alice is a predominantly Xhosa town in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province and the home of the University of Fort Hare, the alma mater of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and an institution with which U-M has formal ties. President Lee C. Bollinger headed a U-M delegation that met with their Fort Hare counterparts during the March spring break.

West says his interest in South Africa "arose 25 years ago when I saw Athol Fugard's play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. It takes place in a Black photographer's studio. Fugard had worked in the South African government's passbook office, and the play is partly about the role of photography in the creation of identity, and centrally about the pass laws that utilized photo IDs as a system of control. Identity was used against the Africans within their own country, limiting their movement and employment opportunities."

With the apartheid segregation formally overturned only recently, Black South Africans are still wary when they see a photographer in their midst. "The people I photograph are living in dirt," West says. "They thought at first that I must be a government official or was a 'Colored'–in South Africa terms–instrument of the government or police, trying to get images that could be used to identify 'troublemakers,' or images that degraded them by presenting them as symptoms of social problems. But over time I convinced them that I was an artist interested in ordinary people doing ordinary things."

As the title of his Johannesburg exhibition "Casting Shadows," indicates, West's South African images explore his sense of the symbolic power of shadows. "Soweto is nicknamed the Shadow City," he explains. "The term has a double meaning, referring pejoratively to the city's exclusively Black population, but also to the notion that Blacks are shadows of the White minority. In fact, when Whites were taught the few key phrases in African languages that they might find handy, one of them was, 'Move your shadow,' which was to be used with African golf caddies."

African Americans are familiar with this "double exposure," too, West says. "Yes, on one hand you're a professional, but on the other you're still perceived as the 'Other.' I want to show that complexity, that duality, in my work."

Edward West was born and reared in public housing in New York City's Astoria community in Queens. "I'm proud to be able to say I'm a New Yorker," he says, in a speaking style that marks him as one of the most quiet and polite of that species. His parents settled in Astoria after his father, a painter and sculptor from Cincinnati, returned from World War II with a German bride he'd met in Frankfurt.

West's mother's family had fled its farm in what became East Germany as Soviet troops occupied the region. She was the only one to reach their destination in the Western Zone, however, and the rest of the family dispersed in the East. West, the couple's second child, was born in 1949, and knew his mother's family only through photographs ("They weren't thrilled at her marriage. She was out of the family").

After teaching stints at the University of New Mexico, the Art Institute of Chicago (as chair of the photography department) and the University of Hawaii, West came to U-M in 1989.

"When I was growing up," he recalls, "Astoria was a vaguely utopian neighborhood, mixed with all groups of people who got along fairly well. It was very different from public housing projects like, say, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. The residents felt that they had prospects to better themselves. The atmosphere was not negative or underclass."

He majored in art history at Lake Forest College in Illinois, and also studied at the Free University in Berlin during the street-fighting year of 1968. "I wanted to look up my relatives when I was in Berlin. I was fluent in German, to even dreaming 'auf Deutsch,' but I couldn't get through the red tape in the East to visit them. Sometimes, being excluded from participation in something only reaffirms its importance. I came away from Berlin, with its political climate and its laws that kept families apart, with an increased commitment to the power of community and communal solutions. We need to find ways to thrive individually while also enriching the common pot."

West returned to Chicago "just in time for the Democratic convention riots." Initially a self-taught photographer, he was "shooting photos of these places and times, shooting all over New York when the ruling paradigm was street photography, like Robert Frank's book The Americans. That early approach probably accounts for my later linking of photography and an interest in the life of communities as played out in public spaces."

The printed images that flow from West's vision are hardly naive or populist, however. He may have one foot in the street, but the other is in the studio, where he steeped himself in the modernist movement "a la Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg." Which means his art "happens," so to speak, to the extent that he activates the colors and shapes on the flat surface of the print. We viewers are not to feel that we are looking at a three-dimensional scene through a window formed by the picture frame.

Yet it was the illusion of deep space achieved in the imagery of Dutch and Northern Renaissance painting that first excited West in studying art. "Now I see it was the photographic quality of that work that attracted me. And photography also let me carve a separate path from my father."

After Lake Forest, West went to graduate school at the Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology. "I got a strict, science-based grounding there in photographic science, optics, lighting–the classic old-school training that has stood me in good stead all my life." But when he showed curators some of his street work from Chicago, they advised him to change subject matter, telling him that "the serious art world has no interest in pictures of Black people."

Since then, the art world has developed a better understanding of the aesthetic principle that West endorses, which he says is articulated best by an observation of Thoreau's:

"There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate--not a grain more. We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it. And then we can hardly see anything else."