Native Work: an artwork by Andrew Putter consisting of 38 portrait photographs (with photography by Hylton Boucher, Kyle Weeks and Andrew Putter)

'Native work' is an artistic response to Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's life-long project to photograph black southern Africans. Cognizant of the dangers inherent in Duggan-Cronin's colonial ethnographic approach, 'Native work' nevertheless recognizes an impulse of tenderness running through his project. By trusting this impulse in Duggan-Cronin's photographs, 'Native life' attempts to provoke another way of reading these images, using them as the basis for making new work motivated by the desire for social connection, a desire which emerges as a particular kind of historical possibility in the aftermath of apartheid.