Grace’s Song by Anthony Maturin and the Village Poets

Grace’s Song by Anthony Maturin and the Village Poets: coffee table, 152 pp of A4 sepia photographs with text, which includes verse from black township and village poets, on facing pages.

The author says in the introduction, “Grace's Song follows on from A Certain Grace, which was produced in Cambodia, in continuing to attempt to portray the essential human spirit and dignity found in poverty, this time in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa where Sandra and I were doing another two-year term with Volunteer Service Abroad. ……Grace's Song’s subjects come from situations ranging from plain relentless poverty to apparently overwhelmingly hopeless circumstances. They have in common that unquenchable will to live that is humanity’s legacy from aeons past.

Grace’s Song isn’t about Africa, any more than A Certain Grace was about Cambodia. Their subjects are people whose circumstances – which but for the accident of birth could have been ours also – have forced them into corners, stripped away the veneers of vanity and self-indulgence with which the wealthier disguise themselves. They have laid bare the nitty-gritty of humanity, pared them down to essentials of bravery, and love, and dignity of spirit. I hope my photographs will help us look below the ugliness of poverty and see those people. They might even help us look below the ugliness of affluence!

The Grace of this book is not a person, and the Song is too big to write down. But it is found in the wiping of someone else’s kid’s snotty nose by an old granny, or a sister. In the washing of clothes under a stand-pipe. Heard in the repetitive squeaking of the wheel as the barrow-full of scrap metal is pushed mile after mile along the tar to the buyers; in the laughter on the corner. Felt in shacks and mud houses, seen in the praying and the joyful dancing. It is not always a pleasure to sing, nor to observe, and it is reflected in the wide skies of Africa.

The will to choose life can take totally destructive forms, because poverty can brutalise as surely as a torturer’s training. But I have also seen, often in the direst muddy poverty, outworkings of a compassion that has its birth too far within to be identified.

One cannot portray spirituality; its roots reach deep into the subconscious, or are otherwise unreachable. But perhaps some of one’s images can evoke it. Inevitably there is a deeper truth than that which can be conveyed merely through the outward physical likeness. You must use symbol and mystery when you can to render the substance.

In the end, I know that even if I use all the skills life has given me to try to make things a little better for some of the poorest, nothing I can do will justify the differences in our lifestyles.

I asked myself in the early hours of this morning, “Why, when another fifty or so years could see the beginning of the end of civilizations as we know them, are you producing a book celebrating the human dignity found in poverty?”

Indeed, what relation does “Song” bear to the threat of Global Warming? Well, it tries to be some kind of a record of a small portion of the present culture for one thing, and as such may or may not survive for very long; for another, it addresses the issue of our attitudes to each other which might become even more vital in a harsher world. But more importantly I think, it is an expression of confidence in the future and the hope that we can find the will to keep Global Warming to no more than 3º, so that the our efforts to build a fairer world have some kind of continuity.

John Gleisner, for NZ Quakers writes:

If you saw Anthony Maturin’s earlier book of photographs from Cambodia you will need no persuading to sample his new book, ‘Grace’s Song’. This time he has put together a collection of sepia photos from Eastern Cape Province in South Africa. He has been living there for the past two years as a VSA volunteer.

Almost all the photos are of people. People who are being helped by local NGO’s. And the few that are not of people show some of the material poverty which is their life. And the purpose of the book is to ‘celebrate the human dignity found in poverty’. The quality of these photos is quite outstanding and as I commented on the ones in his last collection, they are very reminiscent of the great photographer, Sebastiao Salgado.

The poems add another degree of poignancy to what is otherwise simple brutal poverty. Human dignity shows itself more than in our comfortable Western world where the media have captured the public conscience and consumerism and celebrity rule. And what shines through in the photos is the humanity, humanity bearing the suffering not only of poverty, but also of the widespread illness of HIV/AIDS and the losses of so many family through it.

There is a saying that every journey begins with the first step. But that isn’t really true is it? Every journey starts with thinking. And this book provokes you to think. And perhaps will even provoke you to take a ‘journey’. Maybe you have been too long in a comfortable Western rut. And maybe it’s time you give up a little comfort. John Gleisner.

Pedram Pirnia, Senior Policy and Research Officer, NZ Council for International Development writes:

Anthony Maturin’s and the Village Poets’ book, “Grace’s Song”, is a sepia window to poverty in South Africa; Maturin while celebrating human dignity through his photography has managed to beautify poverty and evoke spirituality.

The problem with photography like every other art form is the implication that we know the world. One of the characteristics of the camera is its truth telling capacity – when we take a photograph we claim we know. This is the very opposite of understanding the world which starts from not accepting the world the way it looks. We know now that if there is a possibility of understanding the world it is rooted in the ability to pose questions and perspectives that claim to know the world. Understanding is based on how something functions and functioning takes place in time and must be explained in time. What photography does is that it duplicates the realities of the world and by doing that it makes the world and the truths about the world more available to us. The camera is the arm of consciousness. To photograph is to appropriate the subject photographed. The photographer, the artist claims that (s)he knows.

It is wonderful to see different themes so well represented in Maturin’s book. I am sure it will be of inspiration to many and will make many think about what they can do to make the world a better place in which we can live.

Pedram Pirnia, Senior Policy and Research Officer, NZ Council for International Development

ENDS

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