To see as we are seen

Out  for brunch amidst pine forests and blue dams, chatting with friends over grilled fruit and brioche, tall glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice.  Catching up on news from those who have been working abroad, flying back to the hot African sunshine and sandy white beaches from European cities grey with sleet and winter rain. There is talk of a new play about the artist Rothko, Raymond Pettibon at the Sadie Coles Gallery, London, the film of Where the Wild Things Are, Richard Wright’s  intricate painting in gold leaf that covers an entire wall of a gallery inTate Britain like a bolt of damask wallpaper.  One friend queued for hours to see the latest sculptures of Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy. Another has been hiking in the Alps and going to listen to live opera in Zurich.  Music, theatre, books, politics, life. The diaspora coming home like starry-eyed housemartins winging over the Atlantic in search of warmth and light.

And other friends have flown down to the Cape from elsewhere in Africa: Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, the Congo, a hop, skip and jump from Egoli on the Highveld. All around the table, there are shouted greetings and jokes in kiSwahili, French, Portuguese, Zulu, Sotho. Vivid printed cotton kaftans, dashikis, bubus, all flowing and graceful. The colours of a light-saturated continent: saffron, ochre, scarlet, leaf-green, turquoise, emerald, gold. Brilliant Kente cloth, headwraps like peacock plumage, animal prints and kangas handpainted with oval cameos of village life.

If I close my eyes, I see colours and the morning light glowing against my inner lids. Laughter and that musical lilting kiSwahili with the Arabic inflection, the French patois of West Africa. Once again in sobriety I feel like Lazarus, raised from the dead to a world of brightness and warmth, my humanity restored.

Looking at reality through new eyes. Perception has to do with feeling and sensitivity rather than just noticing, recording what is there. Exceptional photographs like art wake us up to look again at what we thought was there, show us what we have been missing.

A while back, when I was working in media and also helping to produce a small arts journal that featured the work of aspiring photographers, a young woman came to show me her portfolio. I found the work too unresolved and said we wouldn’t be using it. She was hurt — who wouldn’t be? — by this rejection and asked how she could improve her work, if she should use a different camera, develop the images differently, change the paper, the lens, use colour filters, shoot at a different shutter speed etc. I thought about this for a while and then said the problem was not technical. I suggested that in order to train the eye, she might think about spending six months just looking at the work of other photographers, those she admired and whose work resonated with her. The same way that aspirant writers need to read as much as possible. We learn to see the world through one another’s eyes.

Yesterday I put up this image. It is of Lake Keitele north of Helsinki and was taken by the Finnish photographer Aksely Gallen-Kallela in 1905. The more I look at that cool nothern light and the tensile, textured surfaces of that body of water, shot silk absorbing and reflecting sky light, the smoothing and rippling of surface panels, the more I go on looking. How the world looked in 1905 — and that photograph could have been taken yesterday, it is so alive and contemporary.

The photograph above was taken by the gifted South African photographer Guy Tillim, showing the ruins of Mobutu Sese Seko’s palace in the Congo. When I look at it, I see my laughing, brave Congolese friends driven into exile, the tragedy and waste of war.  What lies behind, what needs to be renewed, the place of new beginnings to come. The return of the jungle, that dense fertile rainforest greening central Africa.

And as I look around, sometimes unseeing, sometimes missing the obvious, sometimes able to glimpse the mystery, some phrases from the poet Will Inman come back to me:

“We live in a time of broken sprits. We live in a Lazarus age. We’re all partly dead, and we need to learn how to raise each other from the dead — without pretending to be Jesus in the process. Everybody is broken, but everybody has the capacity to help one another.”