Who is this ghost that sweeps the city of Johannesburg’s streets in the middle of the night? Through his camera lens, Sabelo Mlangeni posed this question in the 2006 exhibition Invisible Women.

She comes out when all have gone in. She is a woman of the night. But such women come in many forms. So, the anonymous woman known to us only in her obscurity signals a question: ‘what do we see when we look at her?’ Mlangeni does not fully reveal what he saw when he took the photograph. He undertakes a visual ‘veiling’ that alters the agenda of the photo, rendering open and unscripted the story told by the ‘invisible’ woman of his title.

Various artists (for example, Mlangeni’s fellow South African Pieter Hugo) have used black-and-white photography to evoke a voyeuristic gaze which exposes its subjects to uninvited inspection. But not in this instance. The movement in this photo, and its blurring of contours, rebuff any attempt we might make to know this woman. She will not be demystified.

And yet the photo also suggests an impending immediacy of presence. In the dialectic of nearness and distance at play here, Mlangeni collapses the space between the onlooker and the woman. Virtually nothing is shown of the road that separates her from us; we see only a thin strip beneath the steep drop of the kerb. It is as though she approaches the front of a stage, presaging imminent contact with the watching audience, and with it our possible transformation through a direct relationship with her (in contrast with the voyeur, who stays hidden).

In Proverbs 9, two different invitations can be heard in the city streets. Both invitations ask the hearer to turn aside (vv.4, 16) and see something new. But only one of these invitations (uttered by Wisdom’s ‘maids’; v.3) leads to a genuine metamorphosis: from ‘simpleness’ to ‘insight’ (v.6).

As a transformative presence in the nocturnal city, the woman in Mlangeni’s photograph also signals metamorphosis: whether of the dirty urban space becoming clean, the invisible becoming visible, a ghostly apparition becoming angelic—or (perhaps through her agency) ourselves becoming, somehow, wiser.

Herein lies Invisible Woman II’s most striking feature: she is draped in metaphors; enigmatic but engaging; issuing an open-ended challenge to the ways in which we look; and asking what our ways of looking allow us to see.

References

Mlangeni, Sabelo. 2007. Invisible Women, Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art Catalogues 26 (Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits)