TECH OF THE TOWN

Photographer David Lurie’s book ‘Dreaming the Street’ captures the rise of digital technology on the continent and its enabling of the creation of a new ‘Afropolitan’ identity, writes

David Lurie, who was born in South Africa in 1951, worked as an economist in London for many years before turning his interest in photography into a full-time career. His first book, Life in the Liberated Zone, was published in 1995. It was accompanied by texts by Rian Malan and took a clear-headed but empathetic look at life in Cape Town’s townships. It demonstrated Lurie’s particular talents as a photographer not only of marginalised people but whose previous life in economics gave him a keen sense of how the worlds of ideas and reality are often closer than they may appear.

In the postapartheid era Lurie, who has been based in Cape Town since 2011, has published a number of books, many of which have continued to explore the lives of subjects who exist beyond and beneath the picture postcard, tourist-friendly exterior of the Mother City and its environs; and others which take a more contemplative approach to examining questions around climate change and precolonial history in places such as the Karoo and the Cradle of Humankind.

While Lurie has traced some of the familiar formal and thematic territory of the broader South African street and documentary photography tradition, his work has singled itself out for what the critic Ashraf Jamal has described as the photographer’s ability to “find grace in the most unyielding of places”.

His latest book, Dreaming the Street, combines images from a previous series on Cape Town’s Long Street with new ones captured in and around Joburg’s Maboneng. It offers a bittersweet rumination on the role of technology in the digital age which, while it presents an opportunity for the liberation, self-expression and interconnection of Africa’s new generation, poses a threat by providing the tools for cultural and political destruction through data mining and surveillance.

Lurie says the new work was partly inspired by his reading of a 2017 essay by philosopher and theorist Achille Mbembe which examined the rise of digital technology on the continent and its enabling of the creation of a new “Afropolitan” identity, characterised by Mbembe as “a new form of worldliness ... recognised by the extent to which the local is shaped by, and transacted through, global symbolic resources and imaginaries of circulation.”

Mbembe posited that “the computer and the cellphone are the key technological vectors of Afropolitanism. They have become the portable stores of knowledge and crucial devices that have changed the way the new African speaks, writes, communicates, imagines who he or she is, or even relates to others and the world at large.”

These technological devices are subtly evident in many of Lurie’s images whether in the hands of chic youngsters talking to each other in between looking at their phone screens on Long Street; occupying the attention of physically close but emotionally distant customers at an internet café; draped like jewellery around the necks of inner-city hawkers in Joburg; or lying briefly ignored on the rocks of a beach next to a couple sharing a moment of intimacy.

The bigger and more anxious questions about the worst-case consequences of our reliance on digital technology lie everlurking beyond the frames of Lurie’s images. He admits that while he “loves tech” and believes “it will add years onto my active life”, it also “scares the shit out of me” because of the nefarious ways in which tech companies have turned the democratising idea of interconnectivity into a means for “tracking every part of our lives”.

This is a warning echoed by Mbembe, who writes in his essay: “Formatting as many minds as possible, shaping people’s desires, recrafting their symbolic world, blurring the distinction between reality and fiction and, eventually, colonising their unconscious, have become key operations in the dissemination of micro-fascism in the interstices of the real.”

For every Arab Spring in which technology seems to bear out its best uses, there are as many if not more QAnon, Covid-conspiracy, libertarian-contrarian hysterical moments that seem to signal tech’s worst effects.

These may be pertinent and pressing issues for a consideration of the pervasiveness of digital technology in Africa in all its messy, contradictory glory and angst, but they don’t strike the viewer paging through Lurie’s book. Rather they play a significant role on second, third and further returns to the images which, in the light of the accompanying essays, begin to emerge as far more than smartly grabbed street portraits of colourful characters and juxtapositions.

They stand as dreamlike portals for the consideration of a timely set of contradictions that will, as Lurie writes in his introductory essay, allow future viewers to ponder what might be a strange and fleeting moment when people seemed to be “obsessively conspiring with their digital devices”, and were too blinded by their shimmering lights to stop and consider whether they were “dream machines or control machines? Daydream or nightmare?”