When Michelle Sank was a student at the University of Cape Town in 1979 I was shown some of her photographs. They were small, rich, black and white prints. There were: some portraits, mostly of elderly people; a photograph of two little girls, perhaps twins and their shadows; a round vase in soft light on a round table on which was draped a chequered cloth; and two pictures of statuettes. Together they hardly amounted to a ‘body of work’. Although few and disparate, they were pervaded by a quality that went well beyond what might have been expected of a discerning student. They disclosed not only ‘an eye’, the ability to bring the chaos of reality into photographic coherence, but a much rarer gift: that of imbuing apparently simple photographs of ‘ordinary’ reality with a quiet but potent psychic tension. I awaited further work with interest.

Nineteen years went by and in the late 1990s, Michelle contacted me from England to say that she would like to send me some new photographs. She did, and with a heavy heart, I had to tell her that in my opinion the eye was there but the spirit was not. The tension had gone from her pictures. I wondered whether and how she would ever rekindle something so elusive and so many years and miles from where she had started.

Then came her exhibition, The Emerging Self, at Cape Town’s Month of Photography in 2002. I greeted these photographs of teenagers with mounting excitement, wonder and admiration. Here indeed were emerging selves made manifest: fragile, clumsy, graceful, sensual, sexual, defiant, aggressive, confident, shy, tentative and vulnerable in photographs of disarming simplicity and yet tantalising complexity and poise. The best of them are remarkable for a seamless coming together of moment, colour, composition, content and context with the very beings of these young people. They had not been invaded by Sank and her camera, nor were they revealed in moments of high drama, violence, drugging or sexual intimacy. They had ‘simply’ opened themselves to someone with a tender but unsentimental regard for them and their dignity, and, I think, a strong awareness of the pain of becoming adult and, sometimes, indeed, of being.

What you see here is the work of someone who has succeeded both in tapping into a spiritual quality that she possessed as a student and into an understanding of herself and the world that has come from maturity. She works always with an acute sensitivity to the individual before her and often with a strong sense of the social significance of what she sees. Yet she avoids the now fashionable trend to typologies and the facile bashing of the British and ‘modern youth’. There is a growing and richly deserved recognition for the work of this highly gifted photographer.