EXHIBITION
Revealing photos bring home women’s predicament
Certain topics bristle with so many layers of complexity and multiple readings that they tangle the average tongue. Identity is one; what it is to be a woman another. Both are central to [In]appropriate, the latest photographic show at Cape Town’s PH Centre, which brings together works by 14 local female photographers. The catalogue’s foreword bravely tries to contextualise the photographers’ responses to "cultural norms in SA", a nation that "teaches its daughters to accept misogyny as normal". There is reference to the scourge of violence against women, patriarchal mandates and "interrogating normative conventions leading to toxic masculinity and the entrenchment of attitudes of what is considered acceptable and safe behaviour for women". Thanks to the platitudes and double-speak bandied around during Women’s Month, these truisms can lose emotive power. However, many of the photographs hit home like a swift kick to the shin. In Nicky Newman’s Hillbrow Brothel, shot more than 20 ye...
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