Photography has been practiced in Southern Africa since the middle of the nineteenth century and was widely used to survey populations, classify peoples and...

South African Photography: From Colonialism to the Contemporary (HART0165)

Photography has been practiced in Southern Africa since the middle of the nineteenth century and was widely used to survey populations, classify peoples and organise knowledge. Hierarchical assumptions about race, gender and sexuality inform the way photographic figuration developed from early on. We will explore how the residue of the slave trade, Imperial plunder and Enlightenment ‘science’ produced a dehumanizing photographic iconography of the ‘African’. But alongside the classificatory and coercive, new forms of picturing emerged, from honorific portraits to family records, studio performances to parodies, providing sites through which multiple subjectivities and alternative African-based modernities imagined. The colonial archive constitutes a resource for contemporary South African artists. Crucial too is the centrality of documentary photography and a particular version of this realist project emerged in the middle of the twentieth century that was harnessed to the anti-apartheid struggle. Documents of social life and resistance to the apartheid-era racial order emerged. After the advent of democracy in 1994, photographers and artists looked to reinvent the medium by mobilising photographic history at the same time as exploring its capacity to invent new subjectivities and identities. Contemporary South African lens-based practices (analogue, digital, video, animation) navigate this complex photographic archive from typological imagery to the family album, from photojournalism to the snap-shot. The course will look at the critical debates and historical developments that this rich trajectory reveals, focussing on the way that human figures are mediated and framed through technology, genre and medium within the specific context of modern South Africa.