No Problem was photographed in Alexandra between 2011 and 2013, while the artist was a resident of the township. Alex, as it is known to locals, was founded before the Natives Land Act of 1913, and is one of the few urban areas in the country in which black Africans could own land under a freehold title during apartheid. Another anomaly is the township’s proximity to Sandton, a wealthy, leafy and mainly white suburb. Mlangeni straddled the two contrasting communities in a visual reflection on the realities of segregation and inequality, as well as issues of access for a visual documentarist. When in Sandton, he switched for the first time to colour, as if to mark visually the paradoxical distance between the two neighbourhoods.
As he says:
I have been moving around Johannesburg and its closest suburbs as someone interested in story-telling about everyday life. I am concerned by the migration flow within the urban areas, especially in the context of the South African social landscape, heavily burdened by legislation then, and now by economic constraints. I had experienced neither township life nor ‘Sandton life’ before, and while I was realising this essay I had to negotiate with the police and the locals my right to photograph public spaces, although with very different dynamics according to where I was.
In my early walks I found myself in many spaces where the situation and the living conditions were impossible to look at and to photograph: then I started wondering, what to frame? Soon another side of the hardships emerged, and I attempted to capture that hidden beauty, that ordinary peace.
