Photography as deceit When black and white swop faces   by Lloyd Pollak

It looks like a walk-in Tintoretto. Carved gilt-wood sconces and costly knick-knacks radiate the lustre of taste, wealth, power and privilege. A woman, lean and restless as a whippet, quaffs at a Cabernet with swift, ladylike sips. Her lacquered appearance and air of exasperated boredom suggest the pampered corporate wife elegantly killing time. The maid stations herself at a discreet remove and awaits orders. She stands out of sight so madam can comfortably ignore her presence. Versed in the decorum of subservience she is both there and not there. She disengages her eyes and stares into space with the retainer's air of professional vacancy. Her eye is blind but her ear attends. We give the maid a cursory glance and focus on the madam. Her jewellery, dark glasses, dress, jacket and hair monopolise our gaze. They speak of status and consumption. We dismiss the maid as a mere fop, there to affirm the status of her employer. The eye is no democrat. The more we scrutinise these photographs, the more incriminating becomes the light they cast on our society. The rapport between the women is as brittle as cracked Ming. Stiff postures and clenched fingers intimate tension and animosity. Here there is no give and take, just the frigid litany of order and obedience. Suddenly the chuckling man at my side, photographer and painter Zwelethu Mthethwa, whisks the carpet from under my feet. We are amiably discussing his new work when -whoops! -I realise I have tumbled into a booby-trap. The narrative I fabricated suddenly reveals itself as a tawdry confusion of preconceived ideas in the light of Zwelethu's gleeful disclosure that the overbearing white madam is, in fact, a coloured bergie called Angela, and the cowed black domestic, a white artist named Beezy Bailey. Exploiting every resource afforded by disguise, these two players -drawn from opposite poles of our social topography - exchange identities, and act out these scenarios of dominance and subjection. We first read the photograph as reportage carrying the usual critical implications. Like a reflex, all our hackneyed projections spring to the fore: we know exactly what we are supposed to think. When we learn that they are artificial set-ups, their meaning dramatically shifts. Why did we miss the cues we ask ourselves? Miss the theme of fancy dress and travesty suggested by the chinoiserie screen. Miss the hint of the Anglo-Indian chairs in which traditional British design masquerades as exotic orientalia.

Behind the mask: Beezy Bailey,  as Joyce Ntobe, goes to the hairdresser.

Zwelethu's fictive tableaux revolve around social masks and role-playing, and they exploit decor and props to relay an ironic commentary, and point up the slippage that occurs between the "real" human being and the artificial stereotype he chooses as model. The photographs relentlessly erode all accepted notions of identity, gender, colour and class. No white madam could be as witheringly dismissive as the vagrant Angela, just as no maid could possibly ooze meek sycophancy as profusely as Beezy. The very ease with which the players shed their race and status - and in Beezy's case his sex - subverts binary constructions such as male/female, black/white, empowered/disempowered. When the woman is exposed as a man; the black as white; and the underling as overlord, all the essentialist stereotypes we entertain find themselves violently contradicted. Zwelethu and Beezy's collaboration pivots around Joyce Ntobe, a Xhosa domestic servant from the Transkei. Beezy invented Joyce and has long used her to castigate the hypocrisies of politically correct overkill. Beezy enshrined Joyce as the moral laundress of the nation, and set her to work valiantly rub-a-dub-dubbing our collective under linen. Now the lady has embraced a new career as Zwelethu's model. She has been on call for the past eight months. Beezy's day begins when a make-up artist calls at his home and eases him into the person of Ms Ntobe. Then Beezy sets off with Zwelethu for Khayelitsha, where he mingles with the locals in street shops, churches and private homes while Zwelethu records the results. Joyce is of course, make-believe but the people and the locations are real, and the photographs elevate if resultant conflict between the phoney and the genuine into a metaphor for life and identity. Both Beezy and Zwelethu believe that in our daily life we continually cross the boundaries that separate authenticity from falsehood, male from female, Constantia from Khayelitsha. The divisions are porous and seepage occurs. The township dwellers rarely penetrated Beezy's disguise, and they accorded him a welcome "such as no white person will enjoy for the next 50 years". "Apartheid has been internalised" says Beezy, "and it will take half a century before it - and all the inhibitions we associate with it - erase themselves from our minds." The very strategy of impersonation behind Beezy's disguise reveals the wishful thinking that underpins our rose-tinted notions of national unity, while Zwelethu's photographs record intractable realities that refuse to conform to the redemptive blueprints of politicians, ideologues and intellectuals. Take the photograph of Joyce in the hairdressing salon. On the wall a poster presents us with what must be the aspirational ideal of the clientele. The inscription Black and Lovely - so obviously inspired by the rallying cry of the black consciousness movement, Black is Beautiful - is a defiant assertion of ethnic pride. But ironically the model that illustrates this proposition is no icon of Afro-American identity. She is a blonde, the synthetic product of the dyes, hair-straighteners and skinlighteners that have transformed her into the epitome of white glamour. The fact that Zwelethu appears to record, is that in a global culture, the formulation of black and white identity often relies on the same media inspiration. The modish American term post-black indicates that, as far as self-presentation is concerned, ethnic integrity is now demode. Zwelethu's photographs teach us to see what our conditioning prevents us from seeing - how something of the 'other' inhabits all of us, and how identities we assume to be rigid, fixed and separate in fact overlap, merge, blur and even coincide. In a country beset by ever-widening social, economic and racial divisions, the act of peering behind the mask and recognising the humanity of its wearer, of affirming our communality with those on the other side of seemingly impassable chasms, still offers us a glimmer of hope.