Photography in and out of Africa

Iterations with Difference

Kylie Thomas, Louise Green, Kylie Thomas, Louise Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317358244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a range of perspectives on photography in Africa, bringing research on South African photography into conversation with work from several other places on the continent, including Angola, the DRC, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The collection engages with the history of photography and its role in colonial regulatory regimes; with social documentary photography and practices of self-representation; and with the place of portraits in the production of subjectivities, as well as contemporary and experimental photographic practices. Through detailed analyses of particular photographs and photographic archives, the chapters in this book trace how photographs have been used both to affirm colonial worldviews and to disrupt and critique such forms of power. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I
• 2. Photographs from the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, South Africa, 1890–1907
• 3. Of bodies captured: the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo in apartheid South Africa
• 4. Post-abolition Angola in a post-colonial mission archive: a preliminary contextualisation of a photograph from the Spiritans’ mission in Malange, northern Angola, 1904
• 5. Forward, Ever Forward: a reading of Robert Harris, Photographic Album of South African Scenery, Port Elizabeth, c.1880–1886
• 6. From salons to the native reserve: reformulating the “native question” through pictorial photography in 1950s South Africa
• 7. ‘Mining photographs: David Goldblatt’s On the Mines
• 8. One hundred years of suffering? “Humanitarian crisis photography” and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• 9. Social documentary and personal investigations in contemporary South African photography: Tracey Derrick’s “One in Nine” series
• 10. Re-covered: Wangechi Mutu, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and the postcolonial potentiality of black women in colonial(ist) photographs
• 11. An interview with George Hallett
• 12. “I never didn’t take a picture”: on photojournalism and conflict – an interview with Greg Marinovich
• Part II
• 14. Fractured compounds: photographing post-apartheid compounds and hostels
• 15. Photographic portraits of migrants in South Africa: framed between identity photographs and (self-)presentation
• 16. Remembrance: the Essop brothers, formative realism and contemporary African photography
• 17. The politics of portrait photographs in southern Nigerian newspapers, 1945–1954
• 18. A lightness of vision: the poetics of Relation in Malian art photography
• 19. In search of African history: the re-appropriation of photographic archives by contemporary visual artists
• 20. From myth to history: Ethiopia and Eritrea’s transformations in four photographic works
• 21. The aesthetic and practical fields of excrementality of L’boulevard festival
• 22. The aftermath of oppression: in search of resolution through family photographs of the forcibly removed of District Six, Cape Town
• Index