Content provided in partnership with
Representing the body archivally in South African photography
Art Journal, Spring, 2002 by Lauri Firstenberg
In his essay "The Body and the Archive," Alan Sekula examines the advent of photography in nineteenth-century France as it relates to institutional taxonomies that hinge on discourses of difference. His overarching definition of the archive is rooted in a turn-of-the-century culture in which denotations of class and classification became a basis for photographic meaning. Sekula's inquiry pays particular attention to the ways in which the operations of the archive served to create typologies that became devices of regulatory control. With the apparatus of the camera, categories from criminology to ethnography to bourgeois subjectivity were established that facilitated the cataloguing and surveying of bodies, in visual and discursive terms, in ways that fueled ideological investments in colonialism and nation building. Likening these operations to practices in contemporary terms, Sekula argues that the device of the archive within apartheid, became "the last physiognomical system of domination." (1) His argumen t concludes with a discussion about the production and circulation of the work of South African documentary photographer Ernest Cole, whose infamous book, House of Bondage (1967), critically subverts the operations of the archive. (2) Sekula notes Cole's ability to officially change his racial status from black to colored, due to ambiguities in the government's methods of documenting and systematizing racial identification, in order to gain access to broader strata of society for his photographic project. Cole's black-and-white photographs depict passbook arrests, police inspections, dehumanizing conditions in the diamond mines, "white only" signage in the city--images that would have been subject to censoring.
- More Articles of Interest
- The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism -...
- The weave of memory: Siemon Allen's Screen in postapartheid South Africa
- Doubles and twins: a new approach to contemporary studio photography in West...
- After Apartheid: 10 South African Documentary Photographers
- Art history after the new art history - Reviews
Sekula discusses the way in which Cole, when stopped and questioned by authorities, masqueraded his photographs as documents of youth crime rather than as records of the violence of institutional apartheid policy. In this way, Cole's negatives passed archivally. Presenting his work in the guise of documentary visual policing, Cole was able to leave South Africa with his negatives and go to the United States, where House of Bondage was published. This operation of critical camouflaging, of archival mimicry as a critical practice in the realm of photographic production, will fuel this examination of the ways in which the body is represented archivally in contemporary photography from South Africa.
The work of contemporary photographer Santu Mofokeng offers one model for study. As an inheritor of the documentary tradition and the burden of the colonial archive, Mofokeng is particularly bound to the negation and reconciliation of photojournalistic practice in the context of apartheid. Starting out as a street photographer, Mofokeng studied with the renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt, a progenitor of the reinvention of the documentary genre in the charged territory of apartheid. Goldblatt's work represents an Atgetian effort at capturing silences or obscure illustrations of in-between structures, spaces, and peoples. His practice subtly informs audiences about the polemical armature of apartheid, Dutch settlement culture, and the repercussions of forced removals on the South African landscape. In his body of work published in the book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (1998). Goldblatt records white domination and black dispossession without relying on the presence of the figure . The late Zimbabwean expatriate photographer Gordon Bleach, who lived and worked in South Africa in the 1970s, wrote of Goldblatt's legacy: "He has deliberately eschewed the typical photojournalistic reflex (reductive disasterdrama) and the resultant photographic corpus grows from residuals, interstices, intimations,...the unremarkable." (3)
Mofokeng's work marks a more highly charged and contentious relationship with documentary photography. In his essay "Trajectory of a Street Photographer 1973-1998," Mofokeng recalls an incident when, working for a newspaper, he was detained by a security officer who inspected his belongings and confiscated a photograph of Dr. Beyers Naude, an Afrikaaner former leader of the Dutch Reformed Church who had been banned for his antiapartheid activism. (4) Because Mofokeng was in possession of an image of a banned person during a state of emergency, this photograph was a matter for the security police. In his writing, Mofokeng problematizes the political implications of the "reality-effect" of this photograph in the context of the ubiquitous passbook system, by which blacks and coloreds were segregated and controlled and wherein a photographic portrait was a determinant of one's human rights. Mofokeng's practice addresses the legacy of photography's appropriation and manipulation by the national government, intern ational institutions, and the press.
Driven by his desire not to serve as an agent of "struggle" reportage, Mofokeng opted to visualize daily township life as a gesture of resistance. He produced two bodies of polemical documentary photography--what he terms official and oppositional or conservative and radical-alternative. (5) His reconfiguration of the documentary was manifest in his first exhibition in 1990, Like Shifting Sand, in which he juxtaposed photographs of liberation movements in townships with rural landscapes. This dialogic strategy resurfaced five years later in the show Distorting Mirror/Townships Imagined, originally titled The Private and Public Images of Soweto, in which he responded to the local and international hypersaturation of imagery of South Africa during the apartheid years. Shown at the Workers Library in Johannesburg, the exhibition contrasted public political photos found in print media with private portraits from family albums.
