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Photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa’s stunning large-scale images of life in his native South Africa

With a careful eye, South African artist Zwelethu Mthethwa‘s highly-saturated, large-format photos of migrant workers and urban natural disasters document the state of his native country and its inhabitants today. Depicting everyday people in their natural environments, Mthethwa’s upcoming exhibit, “Inner Views” at Harlem’s Studio Museum, shows a particularly human side of the photographer’s strength as a portraitist.

Curators divided the exhibit into three themes—Interiors, Empty Beds and Common Ground—for an easily-navigable look at the differences and similarities his subjects share, despite their location.

Trained as a painter, Mthethwa’s crafts his compositions meticulously, manipulating scale and color to make an impact. With photos as large as 6′ x 4′, the Cape Town-based artist challenges audiences to take in a complete view—gritty details and all—of the subjects and their surroundings.

“Inner Views” opens this Thursday, 15 July 2010, and runs through 24 October 2010. Mthethwa’s recently published self-titled monograph, available for purchase from Aperture ($39), features 75 four-color images for a comprehensive look at his works to date.

See more photos (courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery) in the gallery below.

pa href=”http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/paulistalady1.jpg”img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1916″ title=”paulistalady” src=”http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/paulistalady1.jpg” alt=”” width=”600″ height=”400″ //a/p
pSao Paulo is the only one of Brazil’s 26 states to include a map of the entire country on its flag; the emPaulista/em state motto exhorts its citizens to emLet great things be done for Brazil/em. And yet, Sao Paulo State historically harboured a more persistent regionalist, and even separatist sentiment than any other Brazilian state./p
pSao Paulo is the richest, most populous state of the Brazilian federation. It is also the West’s most populous sub-national entity (*). At over 42 million inhabitants, Sao Paulo would rank 31st out of the world’s 223 independent countries, just behind Tanzania and right in front of Argentina. It would be the fifth most populous nation of the Americas (after the US, what would be left of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia). According to some reckonings (**), the eponymous state capital with its 11 million inhabitants is the biggest city in the Western world./p
pPopulation size isn’t the only thing that matters, though. Even back in 1842, when still very sparsely populated, Sao Paulo demonstrated the go-it-alone streak in its character by rebelling against the Emperor. The emPaulistas/em expressed this streak politically by their adherence to the PRP (emPartido Republicano Paulista/em), founded in 1873 to advocate the overthrow of the Empire in favour of a republican system./p
pWhen the republic of Brazil was eventually proclaimed in 1889, the PRP got its hands firmly glued to the levers of Brazil-wide power, which it shared with the PRM, from neighbouring Minas Gerais state. The arrangement saw the PRP and the PRM divvy up the presidency and political influence in the capital Rio de Janeiro. It was a cohabitation known as emcafe com leite/em (‘coffee with milk’), as Sao Paulo’s economy was based on the former, Minas Gerais’ on the latter commodity./p
pThis map celebrates Sao Paulo’s separateness from the rest of Brazil by portraying it anthropomorphically. The unnamed lady #8211; let’s call her emPaula/em #8211; thus serves as Sao Paulo’s very own version of France’s emMarianne/em or the UK’s emBritannia/em: a symbolic female as allegory of the state’s unique history, territorial homogeneity and separate future. One could say it does so better than the French or British figureheads, as #8216;Paula#8217; actually coincides with the borders of her state./p
pThe emblematic female wears the state flag in her hair, but the slogan is not the one referred to earlier. It reads emEverything for Sao Paulo/em. It would be interesting to learn how the PRP managed to balance the inherent separatism of its regionalist agenda with the demands #8211; and the benefits #8211; of its share in federal governance. Or maybe it didn#8217;t, in the long run. For the PRP/PRM cohabitational system collapsed in the early 1930s, with the power-grab of Getulio Vargas, who abolished both parties and went on to establish a populist, authoritarian Estado Novo. The more regionally inclined elements in Sao Paulo State opposed this evolution. Incipient rebellion turned to inchoative secession in 1932, but the so-called Paulista War was crushed by federal troops in a few months’ time./p
pemMany thanks to Vinicius Morello #8211; definitely Brazilian and possibly Paulistano #8211; for sending in this map./embr /
#8212;#8212;#8211;/p
p(*) and not the emworld#8217;s/em, as reported earlier (see comments). And only if one excludes England, the grounds for which are somewhat debatable (i.e. England#8217;s historic and demographic importance for the UK is such that it is more than a mere #8216;sub-nation#8217;)./p
p(**) the ones that exclude the suburbs./pimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/bigthink/blogs/strange-maps/~4/qB9HL5w8Ilc” height=”1″ width=”1″/

As the Whitney Museum of American Art prepares to break ground on its new, Renzo Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking District, there is a giant question mark hovering over the museum’s handsome Marcel Breuer flagship. The Brutalist landmark is coveted by the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art as a swell satellite exhibition space, and talks are reportedly ongoing. In the meantime, The Art Newspaper invited a few experts to offer suggestions for the old building’s fate once the Whitney decamps downtown in a few years. For David Ross, director of the museum from 1991 to 1998, it “must be retained as a not-for-profit space for the public presentation of art,” while Terence Riley, a veteran museum administrator and architect who worked for Breuer, notes that the “great, grey” building and its less than flexible layout is ideally suited to house a permanent collection rather than act as a kunsthalle. Museum muckracker Michael Gross, author of Rogue’s Gallery, offers the most creative and complete vision:

It could be transformed into a Museum of Cultural Philanthropy, telling the story of the men and women who collectively created New York’s great institutions of art, music, and learning. Imagine if the Metropolitan Museum began releasing its archives concerning donors from J.P. Morgan to the two grand Charleses, Engelhard and Wrightsman, the Opera its papers concerning Otto Kahn and Sid Bass, Carnegie Hall its archives from Andrew C to Sandy Weill and Ronald Perelman, the New York Public Library its whole record of the negotiations with Steve Schwartzman for “his” building, and etc. It’ll never happen, of course, since as Philippe de Montebello told me (with a straight face) institutions like these “have no secrets,” but a boy can dream dreams of transparency even in a realm of studied opacity, can’t he?

Previously on UnBeige: