PARTING SHOT | Emotions of the Sun, a Solar Pilgrimage on Bree Street

Cape Town, in summer, seems like it invented sunlight. Not the thick, smoggy, orange-hued light of Joburg, or the tropical, lush kind in Durban. Cape Town’s crisp sunlight pours itself over the city like a maître d’ who’s been tipped obscenely well — slick, assured, golden. So it’s fitting that Veuve Clicquot, the champagne house that’s made yellow its entire personality, has chosen Bree Street as the latest altar for its global exhibition, Emotions of the Sun.

Inside the Youngblood Gallery, forty photographs by eight Magnum luminaries attempt what average folk haven’t quite managed: getting the sun to sit still long enough for a portrait. Magnum is a New York based photographic co-operative founded in 1947 by four photographers, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, that tries to give photographers the freedom to record what they see without having to work to the agendas of magazines and newspapers.

For these Magnum photographers, holding the sun in their sights is a mighty ambition. It’s like trying to interview a deity — no bad angles, no off days and no sense of restraint. Steve McCurry chases it around Mount Fuji, as if the mountain were a meditative metronome for celestial moods. Cristina de Middel turns Salvador de Bahia into a theatre where light pirouettes across bodies and buildings, a kind of joyful samba of photons. Trent Parke, the Australian romantic, dives repeatedly into the Adelaide surf to catch the moment the ocean and sun conspire to blind him with their combined ego.

But the real homecoming is Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s contribution. His images are steeped in the South African sun — the honest, generous, sometimes unforgiving blaze that shapes memory and place as it illuminates them.

In a collective where mythic mountains and ancient cities sometimes steal the show, Sobekwa reminds the viewer that sunlight is also social: it gathers people, loosens tongues, warms hands and exposes truths.

Veuve Clicquot calls this its solaire spirit, which is brand-speak for the sort of optimism you feel after the second glass. But there’s sincerity in this extravagance. For over 250 years the Maison has worshipped sunshine and this exhibition is its global love letter — a mosaic stretching from Iran’s quiet hopefulness in Newsha Tavakolian’s work to Alex Webb’s Oaxaca, where light ricochets off colour like balls in those old Atari games.

The exhibition, French at heart, can’t exist without feeding you. The “Sun on Your Plate Café” is curated by influencer Seth Shezi, who’s crafted a menu inspired by the sun. Paired with Veuve Clicquot’s luminous cuvées, the experience becomes an edible solstice.

There’s also a gifting boutique where you can personalise an Ice Jacket or direct a Clicquot Arrow to a destination.

What Emotions of the Sun offers is a curated revelation: a reminder that, on five continents, humans have looked up at the same burning star and felt everything from longing to triumph to the simple, animal pleasure of warmth on the skin. It’s a show that reminds us that we all share something — light, no small statement in a time where we seem to share very little else.

R200 buys you entry, a glass of Yellow Label, and a chance to stand in the sun without squinting. In this age of shadows, that might be the best bargain on Bree Street.