Stephen Hobbs: Recording a city in flux

Installation view of High Voltage / Low Voltage (2007) by Stephen Hobbs

In the mid to late 1990s, around time artist Stephen Hobbs was making a name for himself with a series of gritty, low-grade video recordings of inner city Johannesburg, actor Burt Reynolds was staging a comeback.

As audiences were marvelling at PT Anderson’s wayward masterpiece, Boogie Nights (1997), which stars Reynolds playing a caddish porn director, a doubtlessly embellished story started doing the rounds. It had to do with the cruel discourse of media success: asked how it felt to be back, Reynolds replied that he had never been gone.

The same is true of Hobbs. Since making 54 Stories (1999), a short video piece recorded by parachuting a camera down the centre of Ponte Tower, he has continued to live and work in Johannesburg. Like Reynolds, however, there was a time when the former Wits graduate was said to be lost in the woods, or to abbreviate things, gone. Many blamed it on his move from video to photography.

Hobbs retort: “The definitions around photography in this country are very limited.”

Rather than defer to these conservative definitions, Hobbs has over the past few years railed against them. A finalist for the 2003 DaimlerChrysler Award, Hobbs, whose ease into fatherhood hasn't seen him grow his perpetually clean-shaven head, used the opportunity to construct a vast camouflaged wall display. Unlike Guy Tillim, who eventually won the award, Hobbs’ photos were anti-iconic and sometimes downright hard to even see.

“Rarely will one photograph serve as an essay,” he says of his approach to making pictures.

Equally significant is Hobbs’ argument that he is not a photographer.

“Photography is just one of the modes of expression I employ as an artist. It is not the definitive language that I’m interested in – it is part of an assemblage of languages.”

In September 2007, at Wits University’s makeshift Substation art gallery, Hobbs revealed just how adroit he is at moving between media – or, as he would put it, speaking in a new language. Titled High Voltage/ Low Voltage, this strikingly mature exhibition included small sculptural models made from dowel sticks, tie-straps and various found elements. It even included a homage, in the form a toy model, to his yellow VW Golf. Sat on plinths, these models suggested speculative architectural possibilities while offering wry commentary of urban utopianism.

The standout work, however, was also the largest. Two walls of mirrors, each decorated with grid-like tape designs, were held in place by rudimentary pine frames in the main exhibition area. Spotlights created a mesmerising display of reflected light and shadow. The optical experiments of contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson came to mind, as too a host of high Modernist ideas.

An elegant paean to Hobbs’ abiding muse, the city, this work also underscored a key point: “What I do in the free space of my artistic practice is to objectify, criticise, elevate, celebrate and pay homage to a city in flux.”