Putter responds to Duggan-Cronin at Stevenson gallery

Given Mkhondo, 2012. Fuji crystal matt lightjet print, 50 x 35cm, Edition of 3 + 2AP Photograph: Andrew Putter, Kyle Weeks and Hylton Boucher

APC research fellow Andrew Putter's exhibition, Native Work, opened at Stevenson gallery in Woodstock at the end of February, and runs until 6 April.

This new installation comprises 21 black-and-white photographs of contemporary black Capetonians, in 'tribal' or 'traditional' costume in the genre of the iconic ethnographic photographer Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin. These are displayed in a grid alongside the same subjects photographed in colour, where the sitters chose what they wished to wear based on how they see themselves.

'Cognizant of the dangers inherent in Duggan-Cronin's colonial, ethnographic approach to making images, Native Work nevertheless recognises an impulse of tenderness running through his project,' writes Putter in an article about his project published recently in the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories. 'By trusting this impulse in Duggan-Cronin's photographs, Native Work attempts to provoke another way of reading these images, and to use them in the making of new work motivated by the desire for social solidarity, a desire which emerges as a particular kind of historical possibility in the aftermath of apartheid.'

Putter has previously exhibited his African Hospitality and Hottentots Holland: Flora Capensis series at Stevenson in 2009 and 2008 respectively. Group exhibitions include Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive II at the Walther Collection Project Space, New York (2012); Flora and Fauna: 400 Years of Artists Inspired by Nature at the National Gallery of Canada (2012); Life Less Ordinary: Performance and Display in South African Art at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2009); and the 10th Havana Biennale (2009). Putter won a 2007 Spier Contemporary award for his work Secretly I Will Love You More. In 2010 he was awarded a fellowship at the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. He recently completed a Masters in Fine Art at UCT.