I felt exactly like this guy during the dance performance ‘Cinema’, which was showing at the Grahamstown festival. I think it was because I was looking for a dance performance, and at no point did I actually see someone dance. 45mins into the show the most progress I had seen was from a man tied up in Christmas lights who had pulled himself – only being able to move his toes – half way across the hall. Nothing else significant had happened the entire time. My boredom led me to take a few photos, it wasn’t long before I was stopped by a crew member, and his attitude on top of this was sufficient to make me walk out of a show for the very first time.

The only excitement I got out of this was the anticipation of what the media would say about the show the next day. Especially since my dance knowledge is not the best, I wanted to know if it was my personal taste that was lacking culture in this department, or if it was a general consensus that this work was an Ode to Boredom?

I tracked down an established dance lecturer for his opinion: ‘I’ve seen better first year work’, was his response.

And then the newspaper released its article which, in a swoop of elegant words, made it seem beautiful without saying anything at all. I was left feeling the journalist was trying to fill space on a page instead of get a point across.

If I had read the article without seeing the show it probably would have been sufficient to convince me to buy a ticket on a whim, and this got me thinking about the role of media in our society. What we read is so often taken as truth when in actual fact the effort and knowledge put into stories, particularly in tabloids and daily papers, is often minimal. (It was the inaccurate titling, sensationalist choice of pictures, and inaccurate accounts of events that eventually led me to quite paper work.)

This hit a little closer to home when I read an article about my exhibition at the festival. The journalist had miss-matched questions she had asked with the answers I had given. There were also a number of situations where she had quoted the opposite of what the work was about. In the end the story made no sense, and that was the impression placed upon my work. Moral of the story: Don’t do interviews over the phone, or near a deadline!

Back on the dance example, another aspect that struck me was that the sponsor of the performance also appeared on the front page of the paper. Would that sponsor still hand out advertising money if there was a bad article about one of their performances in the newspaper? I don’t think so. A few years ago I learned this the hard way as well after I was arrested for photographing a strike at Pick n Pay. The officers words were: ‘The owner of this store does not want media coverage of this event’. And once I had managed to get away, recover my deleted pictures and submitted them to the papers, none of the serious aspects about this major advertiser and the way it was handling its staff were ever published. It was clear, money talks even louder than freedom of the press.

My closing thought is: How can we see through the crap that floods what we see, read and hear every day? We have to learn to disregard information that is used for personal gain or control, separate accurate from inaccurate media, and most importantly, think for ourselves.