Photobook by Cameron Cope
“It was a proverb more eloquent than ‘snooze you lose’ for a victim made chairless. He said it swooping on my spot by the fire, quick–grinning in the flickering light and clutching his rusted prize with tight, tiny knuckles.”
Employing an expanded documentary mode, Pabva Zizi Pagara Gondo (PZPG) visually allegorizes the legacies of colonialism, civil war and mass emigration in Zimbabwe. In his work Cope also contemplates the experience of ‘mukwasha’ (son in law), building a visual prose that plays on the title’s metaphor of trading places.
‘Pabva Zizi Pagara Gondo’ is an expression in Zimbabwe’s Shona language and translates as ‘where the owl left the eagle comes to sit’ – used in the spirit of ‘snooze you lose’.
PZPG was a finalist in the Australian Photobook of the Year Awards 2017.
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