Sven Christian [SC]: Let’s start with the title of the show, Alter Nature?

Brett Rubin [BR]: Initially I was looking at the word ‘alta’ — which is used as a prefix in the term ‘alta nature,’ meaning ‘higher nature’ — as in ‘altitude’. So there is this term for extremely beautiful vistas of mountains, but there’s also a religious meaning to it, meaning high grace. I was quite fascinated with this term. These images are also, in a way, altered. I am working with the imperfections of film. With the medium there’s an element of surprise. Sometimes it feels like someone or something else is authoring the work with you, because of the nature of the processes involved.

I then tried to dig deeper into what this series meant to me. One image, the biggest in the series, was damaged by light leakage; the negative got damaged when winding it the wrong way and it created this curtain-like effect, like a stage curtain across this mountainous scene. It made me think about this strange relationship between the theatre and nature. When I was studying film, back in the day, I was struck by this concept of breaking the fourth wall. in other words, break the illusion that what you’re watching or looking at is a portrayal of reality. That also got me thinking about AI, because I’ve been shown a lot of AI-generated artworks and images recently, so I changed ‘alta’ to ‘alter.’

SC: With AI, the hand of the creator, the person who plugs data into that system, disappears in the process. It’s not all that different from the breakdowns you mentioned that happen when working with film — there are these unintended consequences. You feed it something and it often returns something unexpected. On the opening day, I also enjoyed watching how people interact with the images. Perhaps it has to do with scale, but it was interesting to see how people performed against the images, as if they were backdrops.

BR: Yeah, I really like that effect. I guess a big part of my approach to photography is to challenge the substrate and the mediums on which it’s shown, whether that’s on glass or fabric or any other material. Not to say that I don’t like fine art prints, but there’s a whole world of possibilities, in terms of how you can work with images.

SC: I know that the photographs were shot at different periods. Was there a view towards this show at the time these images were shot, or did that come later?

BR: It came later. It’s interesting because it kind of charts my journey back to analogue, which began in 2018. I was getting fed up with digital photography, especially in the commercial sense. Every job would require thousands of images and for me the process of image-making began to lack consciousness. Film became an avenue to rediscover my love for photography. With a medium format camera you have like ten frames. Each time you push the button it costs money, so more thought goes into the images you take. For whatever reason, my film cameras are constantly in need of repair. Some I’ve managed to fix, some not. A lot of these images were as result of that. I love light leaks and damaged negatives, so whenever I discover them I keep them aside. It was only with a view to this residency that the series took shape. I wanted to avoid being under pressure to make something at NIROX to show. I wanted to bring something that was pre-existing, and this was the perfect fit. The scale and natural textures of the rammed earth in the Covered Space informed why I opted for this series, because there was this synergy. I chose black and white film over colour because that would have changed things.

SC: I guess black and white also fuels that sense of fabrication; a colour photograph seems to have a stronger claim to truth.

BR: The history of photography is anchored in black and white. In the ‘50s or ‘60s, people began to marvel at colour, but prior to that people would see the news or watch movies or look at photographs in black and white as a representation of reality, but in this day and age it has this old-fashioned antiquity. When I think of propaganda material I still think of black and white, for some reason. It has to do with how photography manufactures or lays claim to the truth.

SC: It’s a bit like Diane Arbus’s famous quote, that ‘a photograph is a secret about a secret — the more it tells you, the less you know.’ I guess that’s what the fourth wall is about. Showing light leakages or crumples in the film removes or at least points to this. Again, scale seems really important here, but when I look at the images you shot in Citrusdal, the rock structures are quite specific. They’re recognisable. Not only for those who’ve been to Citrusdal, but there’s a sense of familiarity. They remind me of similar formations in Namibia, for example. On the other hand, the small image that you shot in Killarney feels like it could have been taken anywhere. For someone who grew up in Durban, that image is very familiar.

BR: Definitely. That was one of the first rolls I shot. I realised that things weren’t quite working — it was meant to be a double exposure, but only the one layer came through. It’s interesting that the Citrusdal images make people think of the Western Cape. It wasn’t the intention, but I guess it is a noticeable landscape.

SC: Were you on holiday when taking these images? What’s the context for you being there, at that time?

BR: Generally these are works I’ve made on my own time. The complete roll will generally include pictures of my family, with one or two landscapes in between. The images of Citrusdal were taken on a film camera that I brought for a family wedding. I was planning to take snapshots of the bride and groom, as gifts. On the way there I took these photos of the mountains from the side of the road. Their scale was remarkable. I had been thinking in terms of black and white, and I loved how the one mountain silhouetted against the other, the contrasts that were happening with the light… At the wedding it was like thirty-eight degrees in the shade. Over the course of the day I shot the roll of film. I was rushing to change to another roll when I wound it the wrong way and crushed the negative.

SC: The element of speed is interesting. I’d imagined these being shot on some kind of cathartic hike or pilgrimage, but no, they were shot on the side of the road, on your way somewhere else, or in a hurry to change the roll. It’s not necessarily about this prized moment…

BR: I often purchase dud cameras, which are very old and can be easily damaged. I’ve built this relationship with an amazing camera repairman, Bill Bunn, who I enjoy chatting to about the history of photography’s mechanics, but the spiritual journey for me is an inner one, and I do think of these as prized moments, even if they’re fabricated. In a way they stand out. It’s rare for me, nowadays, to go on a planned mission to shoot something. Often it’s just snapshot moments between things, almost a stream-of-conscious approach to working.

Looking at the installation I feel quite immersed. It wasn’t intentional or pre-meditated, but I’m reminded of this quote by Albert Camus. It’s quite cliché now, but it’s about how, ‘in the midst of winter I discovered in myself this invincible summer.’ That was written in an essay called “Return to Tipasa,” which was published in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1942). Tipasa is in Algeria. It’s this wonder of the world — a beach on the Mediterranean with Roman ruins that have withstood centuries. There’s this thing about nature’s ability to endure. Someone at the opening commented on this synergy between the work and the Covered Space, and how people see nature as this beautiful image of perfection, but actually it’s this rugged endurance. It’s constantly undergoing change, but in a personal way, that Camus quote relates because his return to Tipasa links to one of his earlier essays about being young in Algiers and going on holiday to the ocean. After the war and his time in exile, he moved to France and then came back to this beach, to this place from his youth, and he writes of this spiritual inner journey that he went through. He had arrived feeling weary and exhausted, but that trip energised him. With photography that process is there for me. Bringing these images into this space has re-energised my interest in film. It’s given me a different appreciation for that process. Then there’s this aspect of having worked at NIROX back in 2014, which was at the beginning of this journey for me. Coming back here now feels fulfilling.

SC: Now might be a good time to talk about the Zandspruit image, Odyssey (2015), but first, you mentioned Camus’s “Return to Tipasa” and these enduring ruins. Endurance feels key, not only to the mountainscapes, but the Magaliesburg works too — these rocks that are precariously balanced, that have weathered with time. That weathering is echoed in your treatment of the film, but the Killarney image also has this temporal dimension, so the works bounce between this sense of permanence and the more fleeting or precarious. Then there’s the image that was shot at Durban Botanical Gardens, of this dense, opaque forest...

BR: I guess it’s a different view on nature. There is a lot of rock imagery in this series and I wanted to find something that showed a different side of things, but that still has that celluloid damage. It’s less obvious in the image from Durban Botanical Gardens — instead of top to bottom it’s side to side, and the entire floor is made up of lilies or some kind of foliage… I lived in Killarney as a teenager and would holiday in Durban, so there is a kind of personal nostalgia akin to Camus and Tipasa.

SC: For me it’s about a mood. It’s dense, thick, impenetrable…

BR: Precisely. Nature can be this open, welcoming space but it can also be treacherous, dense, mysterious. I suppose on some subliminal level, these all speak to that idea of ‘What is nature?’ In this day and age, with advancements in technology, what relationship do we still have with nature?

SC: Could you talk about cutting-up the fabric into these strips…

BR: That came across quite organically, because of the original image of the stage curtain in nature. Being at NIROX, I wanted something that responds to the setting. I loved the idea of a curtain in the wind. I initially weighed up wallpaper or fabric printing. Wallpaper was a bit too rigid: it would have to be applied to the wall or just hang like a roll of paper, and risk damage of some sort. The cut-up was more because I was restricted to… A roll of fabric is 1.4 or 1.5m wide generally, and I wanted to work with scale, so I thought I would work to that limit. I’ll sit with that image and see how many 1.4m widths I could fit into the frame. I didn’t want to restrict the images but I also didn’t want to shrink them down… I liked this sense of slicing up the image to see through it and move in different ways. I wanted these static images to move and respond to the wind. Even the display with the bamboo, which was taken from NIROX — that was quite appealing, keeping it quite simple.

SC: When we installed it was windy. I enjoy that you have different angles, and a lot of it is about perspective. There are these moments where the wind would blow the image apart. At other moments the images almost touch and line up, so you get this continuous whole. Those cut-ups are also there in the ceramic ink on glass, though. Maybe that’s also a material constraint?

BR: A full sheet of glass is 2.4m, so you can go bigger. Back when I was making Odyssey, when I was first at NIROX. Benji [Liebmann] and I discussed the golden-ratio and working with certain divisions — not offering something perfect but forcing the viewer to join the dots. This work was made shortly after that first stint at NIROX, in 2015, and I showed two other works in 2014, one of which was cut into two panels and one which was a solid panel. That’s where the idea embedded, of not being too purist. I’ve got this idea percolating at the moment of many fine thin slices of an image, mirrors, and how they do or don’t link. I’m going to start working on this during the residency. But photography also has this rule of thirds. It’s only recently that having the subject in the centre of the frame has become popular again. Back in the day, when you were taught the rules of photography, especially with medium format photography, you would divide the image into squares: you could fit three squares at the top, three in the middle, and three at the bottom. When you warp an image in Photoshop it uses the rule of thirds, and you’d usually put your subject on the one- or two-third line. I guess when you’re working with zonal systems it helps with focus and light, but when I was creating those panels I’d use the warp tool and drag my ruler to those lines, as a guide, which was interesting. So I think the idea of splitting up the image echoes that sense of it being a fabricated image, rather than a mirror to reality — a constructed image.

SC: The ceramic ink on glass has this permanent aspect to it; it’s different from the wavey-nature of the works in the Covered Space. That said, there’s also a transparency to the work on glass which makes it feel light.

BR: It’s very appealing, as a photographer, to see your work lit up by the sun. I discovered that process of working because I was approached by NIROX to do something and was told to find a way to show the work outdoors. I asked around and did some research and stumbled upon this process, which I fell in love with. In a very advanced way, it does speak to the origins of photography, when negatives were printed on glass. The original large format cameras were wet plate frames, you know? That series, Autoportraits (2011–20), was shot from the window of a car…

SC: Like the Citrusdal ones?

BR: Yes, but I didn’t shoot that from a moving car. I stopped to take those images. When I began working on Autoportraits I was thinking about something that I read, about how a person will consume more images today than someone would in half a lifetime during preindustrial times. I was thinking about what makes an image memorable — that people were seeing these images on screens and not in photography books or on gallery walls. Glass was appealing for that series because it speaks to a broader photographic language. Fabric doesn’t have the same appeal, in terms of longevity, but with these new works I wanted a medium that wasn’t too precious. Initially I saw these images as failures — something going wrong with the camera — which I’ve since reframed as these sacred moments that you manage to capture in collaboration with some greater force. I guess I didn’t want to be too precious in how I presented them either. I wanted a very robust, forgiving medium. I didn’t even drum-scan these images; I just worked with how they came back to me, and was interested in how weird processing colours left marks, without cleaning it up too much.

SC: Their form is reminiscent of scrolls or objects that have this sacred appeal. They connect to the earthen richness of the space. At the same time, I tend to associate large scale photography with billboards and branding. For me, the work lodges itself between these two worlds.

BR: I was actually looking at billboard material before I discovered glass. I’m glad I didn’t go that route, because it does change colour and perish faster. As a student I had a brief stint working in the dark room, printing my own images. You used to do test strips so as not to waste paper. I think that’s remained with me, in doing these strips. Beyond that, with scrolls and this sacred thing — definitely. It goes back to the ‘alta’ / ‘alter’ conversation. Nature is this sacred thing that just exists around us. In many ways we ignore it, until we can’t. Showing mountains at that scale is interesting because they do want to be big. It makes me think about Monet’s huge panels, which fill your peripheral vision so that you feel like you’re immersed in that space.

SC: I also wanted to ask, because you’re quite well known for your portraiture — the shots of Hugh Masekela and so on — how landscape and portraiture figure for you, on the whole?

BR: I guess portraiture is my daily go to.

SC: Bread and butter work?

BR: Yeah. I get commissioned to do a lot of portraits, and I enjoy taking them. I enjoy coauthoring images with people. I once did a job for the Market Theatre, where I shot forty actors’ portraits for their fortieth anniversary. It was like fifteen minutes an actor, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t. It felt like speed dating, like ‘Hi, here’s what we’re doing, try make a cool portrait, next,’ you know? That’s one thing, but landscape is something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years. Prior to it becoming my thing, I was fascinated with figures in the landscape, how figures traverse the landscape; that idea of road travel.

SC: What you’re saying reminds of this quote by Geoff Dyer in Ashraf Jamal’s essay, “Always the Same Stairs” (2022). Dyer is reflecting on a photograph called The Street, Fifth Avenue (1900–1), in which ‘a horse-drawn cab stands at the bottom of the picture, looking as permanent as the tree growing on the corner behind it. The photograph was made with a relatively fast exposure, fast enough to freeze the caped figure walking towards the camera, while, beside him, cabs trundle slowly in the opposite direction… To think there was a time over a century ago when this moment was now, and that caped figure, even he must have an inclining of the way that now becomes then. When he crossed the street and passed the man with the camera he would surely have glanced back to see what the picture looked like, only to discover that the very thing, himself, that defined it as a picture was no longer there. In a moment he has come and gone, only his footprints remain. It his peculiar destiny, or so this photograph insists, never to arrive at the backward looking vantage point but to be rendered, momentarily and perpetually, as patient as the waiting horse and the buildings, which are still there too.’ Of course, you’re not using a fast shutter, you’re allowing that movement, so there’s an awareness that the person is not locked in place.

BR: But I am using the motion of the car, which is fast, so there’s that dynamic of slow imagery from a fast velocity. That was important with Autoportraits — how these figures traverse these spaces. You pass through in a vehicle, but someone is walking or waiting or… The next time you drive past they’re gone.

SC: My only experience of Zandspruit is like that. I drive through on my way to Johannesburg. There are always people moving or milling about, but you’re only passing by for a moment. To take that image and bring it into NIROX adds a different aspect to it. Most people won’t know where it was shot, but it establishes a different relationship to the space. The image itself is still, but on the weekends there are all these cyclists passing by. It’s an interesting inversion.

BR: Yeah, and the figure depicted is one a bike. That image was taken either coming to or going back from NIROX, so there’s also that relevance to my personal journey. To go back to landscape and portraiture, what I will say is that in 2021 we moved into David Goldblatt’s house. Being a fan of his, that’s certainly had a big impact on me. It’s the stuff of legend, the way he would sit on top of his landcruiser and wait for the light, the perfect time of day, to shoot two frames and then move on. And how much can be said in a landscape image, because it’s as much about what you frame as it is about what you choose not to frame. I’ve been thinking about that and what landscapes mean in South Africa. That’s been a focal point as far back as 2009, when I worked with a friend, Cameron Foden, on the Bier series. He’s a very talented fashion designer who studied in Antwerp. His focus was on monsters of empire. He’d take historically accurate fabrics from the Boer War and recreate costumes, but then all the figures were cloaked in this black fabric to give them this ghostly feel. We’d drive out into the Karoo and recreate sketches of his from all the research he’d done on the spectres of empire. Anyone you speak to in the Karoo will tell you about these ghosts that haunt the landscape, the ghosts of the past. Even in an urban context, it’s hard to shake them off. Our infrastructure is still defined by times gone by.

SC: Ghosts have this association to things that are unresolved, right? There’s an interesting overlap with your treatment of film.

BR: Damaged film is often called a curtaining or ghost image. But yes, that’s interesting — something being stuck. Portraiture can sometimes function in a different way.

SC: What I found strange about looking at those images of Hugh Masekela is how, like with the photograph of one’s gran or a familiar, that photograph grows exponentially in terms of what it holds. You turn to those photos when your memory starts to fail you…

BR: I don’t think photography can capture the essence of someone, but they do become these remnants or shrines. I’ve certainly had far more appreciation of those images since Hugh passed, because obviously he’s no longer accessible to be photographed and people miss him and are maybe looking back at his legacy with more appreciation. At the time, I was motivated by how Rick Rubin, the music producer, reinvigorated or incapsulated the final years of Johnny Cash’s life and brought his popularity to a younger generation. In a small way I wanted to do something similar with Hugh, who was this great icon who’d come back from being in exile for thirty years. I felt like a lot of the imagery of him from around 2009, 2010, didn’t really do him justice. It felt a bit contrived, and I wanted to document him like a national monument…

SC: That iconic quality is different to the historic photography of people playing live, at a rehearsal or up on stage…

BR: There’s certainly a place for that, but it’s not something I’m good at. I’ve tried a few times, but there’s an exchange with someone when you’re shooting their portrait — not the moments when you press the button but before and after, the conversation, the planning, the setting, etc...

Hugh had obviously been photographed a lot throughout his career. What he appreciated from me was more the photographs I didn’t take then the photographs I did. He appreciated that I didn’t try milk it and print thousands of photographs of him or get him to do stuff that he didn’t want to do. I worked with restraint and had to have some idea of what I wanted and be efficient.

SC: Tying this back to the fourth wall and the images in the Covered Space, there’s something about the production of a singular thing, the iconicity of something, that is quite premeditated. It’s crisp and clean. On the flip side, your works in the Covered Space unravel that sense of an image’s singularity.

BR: For me these images also speak to the alchemical process of working with film. I love it when my son, Oren, looks at a film camera, takes a picture, and wants to see what he’s taken. He’s learnt that, ‘Oh, you can’t see it on that camera because it’s film.’ It takes away that immediacy. Sometimes it takes months to develop a roll of film because I stockpile and want to develop all the rolls in one go. Looking back can be completely different to what you imagined in your memory, or mind’s eye.

SC: Seeing the photographs anew?

BR: It’s almost nostalgic, trying to remember the moment you tried to capture. Black and white photography also removes that further.

SC: You mentioned wanting to work with thin cut-up strips during your residency?

BR: That goes back to glass as a medium. I’m keen to try ceramic printing on one side, covering the other with mirrors so that you’ve got an image and a mirror of the space. If you place the strips in different orientations you can read between the work and the setting. I haven’t fully resolved it, but I’ve wanted to combine mirroring and printing for some time. Nowadays you get mirrorless cameras, but back in the day every camera would rely on a piece of mirror to go onto the negative, so I really enjoy unpacking the fundamentals of photography in different ways, taking that mechanical process into a different space, using different materials.