In the video artwork Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School) (2010), William Kentridge stages a split-screen conversation with himself. William Kentridge stubbornly refuses to answer William Kentridge’s straightforward questions: “Can you describe your life as an artist? Can you say, rather, what it is that you did today to give us some sense of how you fill your hours?”
Speaking from his studio in Johannesburg last summer, Kentridge tells the writer and fellow South African Jonathan Cane, in response to those same questions, that he had been in his studio collaborating with editors and artists; working on a large ink drawing for his career-spanning solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; preparing for a major presentation at the Broad, in Los Angeles; and revitalizing a nineteenth-century theatrical technique called Pepper’s Ghost. Internationally recognized for his drawings, animated films, theater and opera sets, sculptures, tapestries, and performance pieces, Kentridge is not, in fact, a photographer. Yet, as he describes, his childhood discovery of forensic photographs recording a terrible massacre, his boxes of reference pictures, and the images Instagram’s algorithm filters into his feed have all informed a photographic approach when Kentridge puts charcoal to paper.
Jonathan Cane: I interviewed David Goldblatt for Aperture in 2015, and I think that’s why they’ve asked me to do this.
William Kentridge: He was a real photographer. [Laughs]
JC: Can we start with you discovering the box of photographs in your father’s office?
WK: In 1961, when I was six, my father was one of the lawyers representing families at the inquest into the Sharpeville Massacre. He had his study down the corridor in the house we lived in. I went in there one afternoon, and there was a yellow box, which I thought looked like a box of chocolates. It was bright yellow and was, in fact, a box of Kodak 8-by-10 film. I opened it, expecting to find chocolates. So that was already kind of transgressive, to be stealing a chocolate in the middle of the afternoon.
But instead of chocolates, what it contained was a pile
