“Attached to the Soil,” the Fulbright Scholar portrait project by Peter Glendinning, professor of photography in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, is a featured exhibition and was the kickoff event for the monthlong inaugural Cape Town Photography Festival in South Africa.
Consisting of 50 photographic portraits, Glendinning’s “Attached to the Soil” was created over a seven-month period in 2019 as he traveled throughout South Africa as a Fulbright Scholar to each of the country’s nine provinces to produce a body of work inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela in his May 10, 1994, inaugural address as the first President of the Republic of South Africa.
The portrait project’s title is drawn from the first words President Mandela shared when he took the oath of office. He conveyed his hopes for unity among the citizenry by proposing a soil-related metaphor, stating that they were all “as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous Jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the Mimosa trees of the bushveld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal.”
Those words of hope and reconciliation served as the lens through which the “Attached to the Soil” exhibition was created.
When Glendinning traveled to South Africa in 2019, the year marked the 25th anniversary of Nelson Mandela becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected president and 25 years since the end of apartheid. During the seven months he was in South Africa, Glendinning collaborated with 48 South African university students who shared their aspirations for their country through their own contemporary soil-related metaphors. The students also identified someone in their life who related in some way to their metaphors and was willing to share their story and be photographed for the portrait project.
Each of the 50 resulting works contains a photographic tableau-portrait of a person introduced to Glendinning by a South African university student, along with an oral-history based story from their life that is related to their realities, hopes and disappointments, along with the student’s soil-related metaphor.
This series of photographic portraits, youth metaphors and oral history-based stories comprise the “Attached to the Soil” exhibit. The portraits, featuring South Africans of all ages and social backgrounds, were created in locations related to each subject’s story. Their stories were translated into Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans and English, four of the 12 official languages of South Africa. A selection of these works can be found on Glendinning’s website.
The 50 works were exhibited at six university art galleries in South Africa beginning in 2022, followed by an eight-month exhibit at The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg in 2023, then a three-month exhibit in 2024 at the William Humphreys Art Gallery, which is one of three national art museums.
Now in 2025, the ninth solo exhibition of “Attached to the Soil” opened on Sept. 3 at the Simon’s Town Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the inaugural Cape Town Photography Festival, which runs Sept. 4-27.
“It is a great honor to have the project featured as the opening event of the inaugural edition of the festival,” Glendinning said, “and I’m especially pleased that the aspirations of the youth who collaborated with me will be more widely known in the ‘Mother City’ of South Africa. Their heartfelt expressions about their country, conveyed through works of art I had the privilege to collaborate on with them along with our story subjects, have made an important contribution to the civil society dialogue in each venue’s community, one that is ongoing in South Africa.”
As part of the inaugural Cape Town Photography Festival, Glendinning delivered the opening address at the exhibition opening. He also taught a day-long master class in photography workshop for Simon’s Town community members at the Simon’s Town Museum, which covered technical, conceptual and practical elements. And, he made a presentation at 6 Spin Street Gallery in Cape Town on “Photography Basics & Beyond.”
Glendinning’s trip to South Africa for Cape Town Photography Festival is supported by a College of Arts & Letters CFIT (College Fund for International Travel) grant with major support from the African Studies Center at Michigan State University.
“I am so grateful to the faculty and leadership over many years of Michigan State University’s African Studies Center, which is widely known throughout Africa in general and South Africa in particular,” Glendinning said. “The history of tremendous extension of service and creation of new knowledge by faculty members who have served in Africa for many generations, was the academic ‘shoulders’ that I have stood on in all the work I have done there.”
This story originally appeared on the College of Arts and Letters website.
