Joe Ractliff

From what I could find online, there is very little bio published on Jo Ractliffe. She is however, very active in her work and has been featured in many large exhibitions and continues to do so. Jo Ractliffe was born in 1961 in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed both her Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Cape Town. In 1999 she was the recipient of the Vita Art Prize.

Some of her most famous Solo exhibitions include Terreno Ocupado in Johannesburg in 2008. She has also featured work in several group exhibitions including the seventh Gwangju Biennale, in Korea three years ago. She also participated in Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Centre for Photography, New York. Today she lives and works in Johannesburg.
To explore her themes of a "revelation of absence", Johannesburg artist Jo Ractliffe draws on a range of photographic and art practices, including snapshot, documentary, forensic and studio photography, as well as installation video and projections.

One critic writes, "It is not accidental, that Ractliffe has chosen photography as the medium most suited to her thematics. Photography occupies a beautifully, maddeningly awkward space between otherness and the real, between art and documentary journalism".

In her own words Ractliffe states, "What interests me are things that are ephemeral - desire, loss, longing - and their relationship to photography. I am also curious about what we don't expect from photographs, what they leave out, their silence and the spaces they occupy between 'reality' and 'desire'. I try to work in an area between the things we know and things we don't know; what sits outside the frame. I am interested in exploring these oblique and furtive 'spaces of betweenness', and in how they figure in producing meaning in a mode of representation that seems so often predicated on specificity and transparency. Photography is quite a resistant and unforgiving medium."

Most of Ractliffe’s photographs are shot in black and white. She seems to have re-occurring themes of depth in her photos. Many have a distinct fore, middle, and background aspect to them. They are very documentary in approach, and show the gritty nature of South Africa and Johannesburg and its people. In her photographs that feature people as the subjects, they seem to be somewhat set up, yet maintain the surprise of a chance juxtaposition. What I mean by this is that Ractliffe is able to draw an expression of personality from the people she photographs. It seems genuine, and not set up. She is very talented at pulling the true story from the environment she photographs.