“The Meaning of Home” exhibition launches at Nelson Mandela Foundation

A young boy rides a horse

August 24, 2010 – A photo exhibition, called the “The Meaning of Home”, which traces Nelson Mandela’s childhood journeys through rural towns in the Eastern Cape, is currently on display at Arts to Main.

The exhibition features a series of black and white photographs shot on film in Mvezo, Qunu and Mqhekezweni, and documents the landscape of Mr Mandela’s hometown and surrounds, lending insight into the physical setting in which Mr Mandela lived as a boy. 

Bam, who hails from the Eastern Cape, trained at the Market Photo Workshop – a photography training workshop that was started by David Goldblatt in the 1980s for photographers excluded from formal tertiary education. After graduating he stayed on to teach at the Market Photo Workshop. While there, he was selected for the prestigious Getty Images Fellows Programme, on which he completed a photography course in New York before returning to South Africa.

Bam explained the motivation for the exhibition, saying that he wanted to tell the story of an icon through the landscape and structures that influenced his political life. As far as Bam is aware, this is the only body of work dedicated entirely to Mr Mandela’s early life.

Bam said: “This was a self-assigned project. It began when I came back from New York and I was inspired by Mr Mandela himself, who spoke quite clearly [at an event which Bam photographed] about his life story. He explained how he grew up and the struggles that he went through as a boy.”

The collection took three years to complete and traces Mr Mandela’s childhood journey from Mvezo, where he was born and where his umbilical cord is buried at his family kraal, then on to Qunu and finally to Mqhekezweni.

Bam says he feels that this is his most significant work to date: “This is the most important project of my life. Madiba motivated me to take photography seriously and, as a result, that made me work on this project with the intention of revealing the hidden or silent story about the man who has inspired the world.”

Bam explains that he hopes that this exhibition helps people to understand Mr Mandela a bit better: “Most people don’t know where Madiba is coming from and I wanted to share with ordinary citizens, or anyone who is interested in his roots, that, as much as he is a recognised figure in the world, he is a humble person who comes from an ordinary background. I think we can motivate other people who might be hopeless and think that they cannot be leaders in the future.”

Bam, who has been exhibited in New York, Austria, the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands, is now working on a project that will document various South African cultural practices. The photos will be shot in colour using a digital format. 

His next showing, a group exhibition of three generations of South African photographers entitled “Struggle, Apartheid and Freedom”, will open in October at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.