Ballade: Michelle Sank

Ballade is a poetic homage to Michelle Sank's birthplace, Cape Town. A testament to memory, people and place, enhanced by the magical African light and colour. 

In this new series, the artist  has travelled back to her home town and revisited memories of the Sea Point Promenade that was so formative in her early years as a student of photography. 

The remarkable images are accompanied in the gallery by a specially commissioned essay by the writer Alexandra Dodd:

 

The strange porousness between place and person is one of the prime magnetic aspects of Michelle Sank’s images. Whether photographed in the urban public terrain or within the private realm of people’s homes, her portraits tell subtle stories about the way we humans shape and are shaped by our cultural environments, which sculpt the way we dress, eat, speak, greet one another, make out… In fleeting moments of random connection, Sank records each person’s effort to resist the persistent forces of social production – to stand out and declare themself individual, singular, living their one precious life.

 

Your body and your birthplace are not automatically your home. You find yourself located in a particular place, impacted by all the textures, structures, freedoms and constraints that this physical context entails. In trying to forge a home for yourself in your city and in your body, you develop affective ties with the material environment, attachments to the place in which you find yourself. Yet, in your neurochemical depths, you exceed the material limits of space and place – you are everywhere at once, unbounded by body, wall or border. These are the contradictions of implacement – the fundamental human interplay between body and place that she documents.

 

Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town and grew up in an immigrant community during Apartheid. She left South Africa shortly after completing her studies at the Michaelis School of Art, where, in her final year, she discovered photography as her medium of expression – a connection she has described as ‘umbilical’. Social documentary gave her a mode through which to give voice to the affinity she felt, and still feels, with others experiencing the alienation and dislocation of unbelonging. Even though she has been living in Exeter in southwest England since 1987, Cape Town’s imprint has persisted. Her work activates themes of socio-economic, racial and gender diversity – with an autobiographically charged interest in the struggles and dreams of young people growing up in suburban and coastal towns and in documenting the wider communities there as a whole. Now, decades later, she has been returning with her camera to the coastal town of her own becoming. This is what gives her new body of portraits, photographed along the Sea Point Promenade and the adjacent Pavilion Pool in the summers of 2022 and 2023, its extra dimension of feeling.

My strongest memories are of the Sea Point Promenade in Cape Town and its accompanying Pavilion swimming pool where I frequented the long walkway and its bordering vast grass areas through all of my formative years. I was born there, and my recall is one of tableaus transpiring through play, encounters and festivities. The pool, the walkway, the beaches and the green areas all served as stage sets within which diverse performances unfolded.… Returning to Cape Town in 2022,  I was once again drawn to these spaces where little seems to have changed in terms of structure and recreation but existing now with a celebration of cultural and social diversity.

 

The Promenade, which starts at Mouille Point and runs along the water’s edge all the way to Bantry Bay, is one of Cape Town’s most well-frequented public spaces, bringing together cyclists, vagabonds, dog-walkers, joggers, cruisers, skaters, beggars, amblers, lovers, salsa dancers and homeless people. Unlike so many other public swimming pools across South Africa that have fallen into disrepair, Sea Point swimming pool remains a jewel of a pool, open to bathers of all ages and ethnicities for a dip in its sparkling salt water. It is welcoming and it works – a joyous beacon of post-apartheid cosmopolitanism.

 

It was not always this way. Although Sea Point has long been home to minority, immigrant (Jewish, Italian, Greek) communities, its population was mostly made up of white, middle-class residents. There were pockets of the suburb which were diverse and where many, largely Coloured[1], working-class families lived, but from 1957 to 1961, they were forcibly evicted from their homes by the Apartheid authorities and relocated to the Cape Flats, southeast of the city.[2] In 1953, the Separate Amenities Act declared Sea Point Pavilion and beach a whites-only public space. People of colour could only enter the Pavilion if they were servants of a white family or were doing work in the Pavilion.

                                                                                 

All of this has changed since 1994, and Sea Point today is a vibrant and hybrid neighbourhood. Even so, property prices in the area remain a barrier to deep dismantling of the spatial apartheid that continues to haunt and divide Cape Town. This is a high real estate zone, as evidenced by the Saint Tropez-style apartment blocks in the background of the photographs. It is possible that many of the people in the portraits are visitors to the area rather than residents. But it is summertime and the living is easy – for now.

Through Michelle Sank’s portraits, we encounter a loose and easy assembly of friends, lovers, co-workers, family members, pet-parents, dog walkers and lone crusaders, making the best of the golden afternoon light along the Atlantic strip. The relationships between them are not always clear or apparent – they could be siblings or best friends, they could be new lovers or long-term partners. What is clear and tangible is the affection that flows between people, and their mutual choice to present themselves in poses and gestures of togetherness, closeness, affection and physical connectedness. The collective mood is fluid and sensual.

 

Intensifying this embodied ease, is a spirit of seriousness or direct engagement in the performative act of being photographed. The person’s gaze conveys the feeling that they’re aware of the gravitas in the moment and that something of their personal nature is being communicated. In some instances, particularly the solo portraits, the vulnerability in a person’s eyes is matched by a hint of awkwardness or softness in their bodily posture. In others, this tenderness is offset by a flash of defiance – and you’re gifted with a sense of the private struggles that the person has had to survive just to stay alive and endure. What remains constant across the images is the non-judgmental energy of the photographer’s gaze.

 

Sank works in an intuitive way, guided by her own internal ‘antenna’, approaching people based on an instinct she feels toward them. ‘It takes courage,’ she says, but people are, for the most part, eager to collaborate with her in making the image. ‘The interaction is very much on an equal level. It’s almost like an electric current – sometimes like a connection of love.’ And she makes sure that everyone gets sent an image later. 

 

For some of the people in these portraits, the moment is a celebration – sometimes an actual occasion (with balloons, sequins, marshmallows and pink bubbles) and sometimes a matter of making the most of the occasion of life itself. For many, the Promenade is their sanctum, the public space they don’t have in private due to cramped living conditions or because of the general pressures and continued challenges of life in South Africa.

 

Praised by her mentor, the late David Goldblatt, for finding the sensational in the everyday, Sank’s images celebrate the courage it takes for people to keep on showing up and bringing something extra.



[1] Many mixed-race, BIPOC South Africans self-identify as ‘Coloured’ signalling their Khoi San, Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Southeast Asian, Mauritian, Saint Helenian and/or European ancestral and cultural heritage. 

[2] ‘Sea Point,’ South African History Online: Toward a people’s history, Last updated 25 October 2021, https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/sea-point.