Michael Meyersfeld

In a career stretching over many decades Michael Meyersfeld has garnered many successes, as commercial photographer and as artist. His entire working life has embraced photography in various forms. He has an extensive local and international portfolio of exhibitions and campaigns. The long list of awards he obtained in London and New York is evidence of his aptitude, as is the list of exhibitions since 1975 and his remarkable ability to view the world afresh. As he indicates, “What is important for me in my work is that it is constantly evolving.”

Meyersfeld lives and works in Johannesburg and he is currently completing his Master’s degree in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand where he explores the role of the Camera Club of Johannesburg in South African histories of photography.

His experimental photographic gallery Backlight continued for five years. This initiative included interactive photographic workshops and discussion groups fostering innovation at the intersections of photography and art. These lively gatherings, mainly attended by young black photographers, provided an opportunity for exposure and networking, supporting and enhancing the work and career development of black artists and thinkers. Special friendships were forged through the showing and discussion of each other’s work and sharing of critical perspectives, technical and professional experience.

Meyersfeld’s work has recently shifted to a contemplation of the inherent qualities in objects. Presented as social commentary, it is notable for its stark, sometimes sombre, lonely and edgy imagery that has separateness from reality. The volume of the external world has been turned down in order that both the artist and the viewer can hear and feel the silence. These images could be rendered as abstractions, as less representational, less reliant on meaning and understanding. They are images drawing on texture and dramatic tension more than a linear narrative, pictures more inclined to be felt, to be experienced, than to be understood.

His recent photographs require a different type of eye, not an eye programmed to understand, to fathom or to find a narrative, but one that is alerted to a deeper sense of awareness. With an eye liberated from the dominant quest to find and attach meaning, more faculties, other than just the cognitive, are employed to sense and experience form, shape, texture, play of light, distance and fragmentation, as well as connections and conversations between the photographs. Inner dialogue seems to have taken over the role that commentary was playing in his previous work.

Meyersfeld’s recent exhibitions include Discordance (2013 at the University of Johannesburg Gallery), Dark City Dreams (2014 at the Jewish Museum, Cape Town; In Toto, Johannesburg and Puthaditjaba Community Centre, Alexandra), Adaptation (2017 at In Toto, Johannesburg, and in 2018 at Fried Contemporary, Pretoria), and Notional(2019 at the George Henry Gallery, Johannesburg).

Books published by Meyersfeld include Gaze (2003) and Life Staged (2010).

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