Shining a light on white poverty

from the Independent On Line

By Barry Bateman

A white man terminally ill with lung cancer reading a Wilbur Smith novel a month before his death. A white woman cuddling her dachshund. A drunken white man with an old, weathered face.

These are just some of the pictures on display at a photographic exhibition featuring white poverty in and around Pretoria that has opened at The Gallery @ Duncan Yard in Hatfield.

Photographer Adrian Erasmus spent the last year in white informal settlements and poverty-stricken areas shooting people's portraits and profiling their lives.

The collection of photographs illustrates the bleak circumstances these people find themselves in through well-composed toned images influenced by the work of David Goldblatt.

The "tannies" and "ooms" in the emotive prints were shot at their shacks and Wendy houses in Pretoria North, Bon Accord, Onderstepoort and the Pretoria inner city.

Erasmus said he was inspired to shoot the photographic essay after a visit to a white informal settlement in the Cape.

"I spent a lot of time with the people before taking their pictures to try and capture the emotion. I don't heed the technical aspect too much, but shoot from an emotional point of view," he said.

Erasmus said he tried to show that his subjects had dignity and wanted to show that people from various walks of life were affected by poverty.

He does not take pictures for a living, but since the success of these works has decided to pursue it as a career.

"My first cameras were dumped into my hands by my dad when I was 15. I joined the military and was trained as an operational photographer and studied the work of David Goldblatt," he said.

Next week Erasmus jets off to London, where he'll exhibit this series of pictures. The exhibition ends in Hatfield this Sunday.

Trade union Solidarity's social development wing the Helping Hand Fund sponsored the Hatfield exhibition.

Solidarity deputy secretary general Dirk Herman said they became involved because of their concern over a "new form of poverty" that had manifested over the past 10 years.

Herman said the plight of poor white people was a silent poverty that no one said anything about because it was not considered politically correct.

"It is almost as if it is being denied. In the past 10 years poverty among white people has risen by about 150 percent.

"There are about 400 000 white people living in informal settlements and about 38 such settlements in Pretoria," he said.