Darren Newbury

‘Lest we forget’: photography and the presentation of history at the Apartheid Museum, Gold Reef City, and the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto

Since the end of the apartheid dispensation in South Africa in 1994 there have been many new memorials, exhibitions and museum displays that have sought to represent and interpret the country’s recent history. This article looks at two major and recently opened museums: the Apartheid Museum at Gold Reef City in Johannesburg (opened in 2001), and the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto (opened in 2002). The focus of the article is the dominant role of photography in these museums, which is itself an indication of photography’s wider significance in South African visual culture. The article also examines the visual economy of apartheid on which the museums depend, and the forms of photographic seeing represented by the displays.

Documentary practices and working-class culture: an interview with Murray Martin (Amber films and side photographic gallery)

Amber Films was formed as a collective of filmmakers and photographers in the late 1960s (with the Side Photographic Gallery founded in 1977). The aim the group was to creatively document working class culture in the North East of England through film and photography. The first part of the paper offers a brief introduction to the work of Amber/Side as it has developed over a thirty-year period. It situates the film and photographic work in its social and political context, and discusses the collaborative approach to documentary practice the group developed.The second part of the paper is an edited interview with Murray Martin, one of the founding members the group. The interview covers a range of issues including the motivations behind the formation of the group, the relationship of photographic practice politics, and the aesthetics of documentary.

Editorial: the challenge of visual studies

Welcome to the 20th anniversary volume of Visual Studies. Although the journal has only been published under its current title since 2002, this is merely the latest incarnation of a commitment to publishing in the field of visual research first conceived, as the founding editor Doug Harper recalled, ‘in a coffee shop in Rochester, New York’ as a ‘modest summary of teaching experiences, book and film reviews and organizational news’ (Harper 1998, 3). The journal has grown from its beginnings as Visual Sociology Review (1986) and subsequently Visual Sociology (1991) and developed an inclusive approach, publishing contributions from the range of disciplines that engage with images, society and culture.

Seeing the Olympics: images, spaces, legacies

Collection of articles and photo-essays from international researchers and photographers (inc. Chris Dorley-Brown, Paul Seawright) commissioned and edited/curated to mark the Olympics.

Photography and African Futures

This special issue examines the history of photographic ‘futurism’ in Africa. It begins with the observation that from the time photography was first introduced on the continent, European explorers, missionaries and colonial administrators, in particular, developed a peculiar fascination with photographing African pasts or, more accurately, rendering African pastness visible in the act of making photographs. In other words, and as a by now large body of historical scholarship has repeatedly shown, the camera quickly became a key technology for the establishment of colonial concepts of African history, European constructs of African ‘traditions’ and even widespread ideas about how certain African peoples represented previous ‘evolutionary stages’. Thus, it is no coincidence that one of the first photographs ever taken in Africa – a daguerreotype produced by the Ottoman Viceroy to Egypt, Viceroy Ali, in late 1839 (just a few months after the official ‘invention’ of the medium) – took as its subject a scene of African antiquity: the ancient port at Alexandria (Haney 2010, 13; see also Perez 1988). It is indicative that newly arrived Europeans were by the 1870s, at least, habitually using cameras as tools for their ethnographic surveys – producing images that played a key role in constructing ‘stereotypical illustrations’ of African ‘tribes’, through their focus on indigenous people’s most ‘exotic’ of traditions (Ranger 2001, 203; see also Apter 2002; Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes 1998; Faris 1992). And it is illustrative that anthropologists and their agents, from the late-nineteenth century onwards, produced significant numbers of physiognomic photographic portraits, in an attempt to establish an objective visual record of the ‘average’ physical characteristics of African ‘races’ (Shortland, cited in Pinney 1992, 76). These images were in turn used to support various theories of human physical and social evolution (Maxwell 2008; Morris-Reich 2016).

‘Window on the West Indies’: the photographic imagination of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

In the mid-1950s, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) sponsored two substantial photographic exhibitions in Britain, on South Africa and the British West Indies, promoting its mission activities and forming the centrepieces for fundraising campaigns. This article takes the latter exhibition – ‘Window on the West Indies’ – as an opportunity to examine the Society’s evolving approach to the medium, and its photographic archival legacy. Departing from an earlier practice of relying primarily on missionaries to supply photographs from the field, and unlike the somewhat serendipitous circumstances of the South Africa exhibition, ‘Window on the West Indies’ resulted from a professional commission. In addition to raising issues of ownership and control of photographic production and the photographic image, the commission signalled an increasingly ambitious use of the medium to promote the Society’s Christian missionary world view. Yet, I suggest, this very photographic ambition opens the door to alternative readings that escape the limits of the Society’s intentions. Beyond its role as mission propaganda, including some highly controlled uses of the photographs within its publicity material, the project can be located in the context of a post-war convergence of international humanist and humanitarian narratives expressed in visual form, and a belief in the capacity of photography as a medium for mutual understanding. Although a Christian future, secured in the act of donation, underpinned the narrative the Society sought to promote through its selective deployment of the photographs, taking a wider view of the collection it is evident that the photographs also speak to a more open, uncertain and imaginative relation to the world depicted. This latter not only draws attention to the specific presence of the photographer but also provides an opening to enable the collection to be refigured for future audiences.

Book Review: Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980Morris-ReichAmos, Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016; 320 pp.; ISBN: 978 0 226 32088 5

Race and Photography is a fascinating book, at the core of which is the argument that, if we are to understand them adequately, the practices of racial photography developed between the 1870s and the 1940s have to be confronted on their own terms as serious scientific endeavours and ‘genuine expressions of the science and culture of the time’ (p. 21), not simply categorized as propaganda or ‘pseudoscience’. The latter, Morris-Reich argues, is simply too convenient and self-confirming for postwar scientific culture and, more importantly, fails to acknowledge the interpenetration of structures of knowledge and vision in the racial imagination of the period. In other words, the ambition is not simply to offer a critical account of photographic studies of ‘race’, but to historicize racial vision, literally the ability to ‘see’ race. This is an ethically challenging course to follow, which at the same time as enabling a more nuanced and sophisticated account of scientific photographic practices and their underlying epistemological claims, necessitates reading with a degree of ‘charity’ (p. vii) texts whose social and political implications are ‘repugnant’, allowing them ‘to present themselves as stronger, more convincing, coherent, and closer to mainstream branches of science’ (p. 28) than is comfortable for author or reader. Morris-Reich’s project is genealogical; through meticulous historical research and close reading of photographic texts, he identifies those photographic practices developed in the late 19th and early 20th century that would converge in the Weimar and Nazi periods to such disturbing effect. (The end date given in the subtitle is somewhat perplexing, since even if there is reference to the later archival accessibility of images, and recent exhibitions, the book does not extend beyond the 1940s in any significant way.) The opening chapter charts three strands in this genealogy. First, the anthropometric photography of Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton and Rudolf Martin, whose principal contribution, Morris-Reich concludes, was at the level of technique:

Relocating the Heseltine Photographic Collection at District Six Museum

This paper reflects on the project of returning an historical collection of photographs to South Africa to be exhibited at the District Six Museum in Cape Town, over sixty years after they left the country. Curated by the author, the ambition of the exhibition was to begin the process of reconnecting the photographs to the city in which they were made. Informed by responses to the exhibition, the paper explores: the challenges of redisplaying historical photographic collections; the work of ‘reconnecting’ photographs to the people and places in which they were made; and how revisiting photographic depictions of the past might contribute to imagining South Africa’s present and future.

Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto

Established at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kliptown is among the oldest of the urban settlements that comprise the vast township of Soweto, which lies to the south-west of Johannesburg. Together with townships such as Sophiatown and Alexandra, Kliptown was one of the few places in South Africa where blacks could own property, and for the first part of the century it was home to a rich mix of different cultural and racial groups. Its national historical significance derives, however, from the mass political gathering that took place there on an abandoned patch of land during two days in June 1955. The Congress of the People was convened by a coalition of anti-apartheid organizations led by the African National Congress (ANC), known as the Congress Alliance. Other members of the alliance were the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the Coloured People’s Congress and the Congress of Democrats. The meeting represented the culmination of a year’s work gathering views from across the country and across racial lines that were synthesized into a declaration of political values and human rights to form the basis of collective opposition to apartheid. Nearly 3000 delegates were elected to attend the meeting in Kliptown, which would ratify the final form of what was known as the Freedom Charter.

Kurdistan: In the shadow of history / Daring to look: Dorothea Lange's photographs and reports from the field

This largely unknown collection has been rediscovered by the BBC and David Okuefuna, who in 2008 produced both this book, The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, and a documentary series based on the same collection. It is indeed a paradox that Kahn was once a Henri Bergson student. Perhaps, no one other than Bergson could capture the complex relationships of images, time and memory. And perhaps Bergson’s interpretations are the only ones that can make us understand how such an incredible invention and magnificent project could be forgotten for almost a century. But in my memory, the images of the past world in colour are linked to a totally different epoch. The Great War, the Second World War and that epoch are fixed in my mind in the black-and-white images of Capa, Cartier Bresson and Tina Modotti. It is a world as distant as fascinating to me. The colours, or the lack thereof, have always given me a sense of distance, placing technology and the image as a clear separator of two epochs. This book and this collection have forever changed my perception of that time; the colours have brought the past closer to me, speaking a language that I can understand and relate to, the language of colour. There is perhaps one lesson in this experience, namely that collective memory, as Maurice Halbwachs said, is indeed a process of historical selection that decides what to celebrate and remember of our past, and that events once significant to an entire community will be soon forgotten if not celebrated, remembered and passed on. The economic crash of the 1930s that hit Kahn and his project and perhaps the human devastation of the Second World War changed the filter of memory of that time and cancelled one invention and a collection that tried to portray a world of peace and multiculturalism which seemed not to exist. We should be extremely grateful to those who have brought us back this slice of history. It goes without saying that if you, like me, still think of our grandfathers in black and white, your memory will be forever changed by this book and the histories it describes.