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It is no surprise that Zwelethu Mthethwa was once a painter. Sumptuous color pervades the 17 photographs from three series comprising his solo exhibition "Inner Views" at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Rectangular swatches of lime green, salmon pink, and bright yellow transform an untitled work from the "Common Ground" series (2008) from an abandoned interior into geometric formalism. A pregnant woman in an untitled photograph from the "Interiors" series (2000) reclines in a sea of inky midnight blue. A quiet center of negative space in the buttery-hued untitled piece from the "Empty Beds" series (2002), pushes the action to the image's edges. The compositions converse with abstraction.

Mthethwa’s photographs of migrant workers living outside of Johannesburg and homes destroyed by natural disasters in New Orleans and Cape Town transcend what scholar Okwui Enwezor calls the "cul-de-sac" (read: dead end) of South African post-apartheid documentary photograph. In his essay entitled "Photography After the End of Documentary Realism," which is included in Mthethwa’s new Aperture monograph, Enwezor writes that much contemporary South African photography is suffocated by a "myopia" that relegates it to the narrow constraints of reportage. 



Mthethwa’s work exits this cul-de-sac without denying the real life circumstances that it depicts. Patterned interiors richly layered with stippled, gridded, and floral motifs are staunchly the homes of the dispossessed, scrounged together from scraps of found material. The irony of a makeshift wallpapered with magazine spreads of fancy Western furniture in an untitled work from the "Interiors" series, (2000) is powerful because it is not contrived. We know that we are looking at living individuals who are struggling with hardships, even when their facial expressions range from joyful to impenetrable but never seem dismayed. Mthethwa’s photographs remain tethered to these documentary roots while being able to enter the self-reflexive, formal, and ultimately transformative world of strong artwork everywhere, plumbing the universal depths of self-presentation, resourcefulness, and desire to yield images that are both specific and capacious.