The Myth of Billy Monk

How do you write a myth? With difficulty, I’ve found. It’s not that there is little to say about the one-time nightclub photographer Billy Monk. His short but spectacular life has spawned a veritable archive of hundreds of photographs and thousands of words, many of them rumours. Nevertheless, the abundance of the archive is refracted through an abruptly premature death, rendering the man a kaleidoscopic figure: never fixed, always colourful. 

Words: Mia McCarthy 

To start: Billy Monk was an odd-job man. He was a leather shop owner, a traffic cop, a railway worker, a crayfish poacher, a diamond diver and, most famously, a bouncer and photographer at The Catacombs nightclub. Chronically peripatetic, Monk resisted definition. It was precisely this intransient quality that enabled him to turn such an unchallenged gaze on his subjects, and possibly encouraged such fervent speculation on his personal life.

“Immanence is key. We are in the midst of an event. The energy is electric. What we see, when we choose to do so, are arabesques of feeling, rueful tenderness, entangled heat, spent pleasure, fleeting complicity. But, above all, human connection.”⁣ – Ashraf Jamal. ‘A Delicious Icky-sticky Freedom’. 2020.⁣

“In jail”, writes journalist Lin Sampson in her 1982 essay Now You’ve Gone ‘n Killed Me, “he learned to box and some say it was where he learned a sexual ambivalence because, for the rest of his life, some people would say of Billy he liked men and women. When I asked a friend of his about this, he said, carelessly, ‘Oh, there simply weren’t enough women for Billy. He needed to double up.’” 

Further speculation about the infamous photographer is ill-advised, not least because the archive is already heavy with apocrypha. However, poring over Monk’s own work, one thing is undeniably clear: his subjects were at ease under his eye which, considering the context, tells us as much as we can reasonably hope to know about Billy Monk. 

It was the late 1960s, the height of apartheid. Inside a dockside dive bar that paraded as a pet parlour during daylight hours, insouciant drag queens, Coloured jazz musicians, and good-time girls of every imaginable class and creed allowed themselves (and their transgressions) to be captured with pellucid candour by the flash of Monk’s camera. The allure of his personal mythology notwithstanding, Billy Monk is worth remembering because his work represents a culturally significant history: a then-unseen and now easily-forgotten underworld of sexually and racially deviant couplings refuting the national Calvinist myth that humanity was something to be purified through separation. 

“They were a documentary of the time in the true sense of the phrase. Women with beehive hairstyles wielding half-jacks of Limosin brandy, ducktail couples welded together in the darker corners of the club, a dwarf and cop in mock confrontation.”⁣ – Chris du Plessis. ‘Beats Me’ Column. Cape Times. 1982.⁣

Were it not for an historical tour of the Waterfront led by my unparalleled guide and fellow writer for the magazine, Cameron Peters, I myself would never have guessed at the seedy history of Cape Town’s docks. Beautified as it is by a thin but glossy veneer of commercial development, it’s difficult to imagine the city’s harbour as anything other than an anodyne monument to late-stage consumerism. 

However, Peters’ insights and Monk’s stark compositions erode the harbour’s modern-day veneer like acid, throwing into relief an underbelly portrait of the Tavern of the Seas as a lush and sordid bed of inequity — the refuge of soldiers, sailors, sugar daddies, and sex workers. 

What is most remarkable to me is not just the directness of Monk’s monochromatic gaze, but the equivocal honesty with which his subjects are prepared to meet it. Here they are, posed coquettishly, slumped over coffin-shaped tables, bellowing into saxophones and karaoke microphones with abandon. Monk was no voyeur. Ostensibly employed as a bouncer for the club, he didn’t keep misfits out nearly as much as he let them in. This, perhaps, was his side of the bargain; in exchange, his subjects offered themselves up to his mechanical eye, collaborating in his capture of the ineffable pathos of the partygoer.

“Billy’s body of work reveals a unique and hidden gathering place in apartheid South Africa. A bubble of existence, a place for jazz music, dancing and drinking and unbridled joy, all captured by Billy, not an outsider but one of them. A gent yet a bruiser, a saint and a sinner, straight versus gay, an artist and a lowbrow. It’s a stunning collection where the bizarre and tragic is as prevalent as the joyful and humorous.”⁣⁣⁣⁣– Craig Cameron-Mackintosh. ‘The Brilliance of Billy’. High Life Magazine. February 2019 

Monk endeavoured without contrivance to document his habitat with an honesty that reads like tenderness. Even his careful naming conventions look like diary entries, listing simply the location and the date of capture. Though he is posthumously lauded as a man who lived for his art, it’s likely that Monk was, like other photographers of the time, taking pictures to sell to the sailors who frequented the docks. If anything, his savviness ingratiated him even more to his equally mercenary subjects and made possible the inimitable intimacy for which his photographs have become renowned. We forget, after all, that even Shakespeare was primarily motivated by the promise of a paycheck.    

He left his collection in a studio space he shared with Paul Gordon, an editorial photographer, before executing one of his period disappearances to the sea to make money. The meticulously labelled negatives were on the verge of being thrown out before they were uncovered by Sampson and delivered into the hands of South African photographers Jac de Villiers and David Goldblatt who, with Monk’s blessing, staged an exhibition at the The Market Gallery to critical success. 

Monk never learned how well his work was received. On his way to Johannesburg to see the show for himself, he was fatally shot in a trivial argument. “Now you’ve gone an’ killed me,” he admonished the shooter. How could he have known, then, that he would never die? 

BILLY MONK 

Billy Monk images copyright and courtesy of the Billy Monk Collection. 

www.billymonk.com 

@ billymonkcollection