(Portrait series taken from the multi-media film of the same name. Selected by NAN GOLDIN for CPH Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, 2011)

Statement.

I remember the Crest Hotel from way back in the 70s. In fact, it was from this hotel that I gathered my first impressions of our newly adopted land, South Africa.

Emigrating from England with my parents in January 1975, I was 12 years old when we arrived at the Crest after a short cab ride from the austere Jan Smuts airport. Upon entering this comfortable three-star hotel, a stone’s throw from the bustling boulevards of Hillbrow, I was awestruck by the views from our 12th floor window. Glittering skyscrapers and a zillion apartments surrounded us on all sides. The Crest seemed to sit at the epicentre of all this glitz, with its lively terrace and sparkling pool.

For the two weeks we stayed there while my father searched for rented accommodation in the leafier northern suburbs, I absorbed impressions of this “Americanised” metropolis. I admired its scale and lofty buildings, sensing its energy and ambition, all the while searching out black faces to remind myself that I was in Africa after all.

During those first few weeks, strolling past the cafés, bakeries and soda-pop joints of Pretoria and Kotze Streets on balmy summer evenings, it was clear this was the playground of a predominantly white cast. I saw lots of happy white faces. An illusion of blissful living. An illusion of harmony. The little white kid who had just stepped off a plane from England was entranced.

Thirty-two years later, I returned to the Crest. Still entranced, but for very different reasons.

The place had changed. The city had changed. The country had changed. I had changed.

The Crest Hotel became my attempt to join dots between memory, migration and dislocation. Projected through the presence of others, the Crest was, after all, where my South African journey began.

For many of the people presented here though, this is where their own journey is ending — or has ended already. Their relationship with South Africa is drawing to a close.

Mine perhaps is only now beginning to reveal itself properly.

The Crest was where I chose to begin that investigation.

Richard Mark Dobson
Johannesburg
2009