Photographing a South African form of sudden death

Photographies, 2022

Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.

Kronos, 2012

Between March and September 2012 there have been sixteen instances of ‘necklacing’ in the townships just outside of Cape Town. This article argues for understanding these events in relation to the violence of apartheid. Itapproaches the question of the meanings of the persistence of necklacing through an analysis of photographs of people who had been subject to vigilante violence in the 1980s. The article focuses on the work of Gille de Vlieg, a photographer who, during apartheid, was a member of the Black Sash and of the Afrapix photography collective. I read de Vlieg’s photographs as a series of ‘wounding apertures’that open a space for affective engagements with the violence of both the past and of the present. The importance of such engagements, the article argues, lies in what political philosopher Hannah Arendt has theorised as the constitutive relation between feeling, thinking and judging.

Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space, 2022

If you're] rich, then you can be a man among men. You've got a voice in the country, in the world, wherever. Even if you pass by where people stay, sit, and then they can point [at] you with a fin ger, "Yeah, you see that guy." Because you're well known. But if you're just simple like me, ah. .. even if you greet some of the guys, they'll say, "Ah, this guy.. .. What for? Why is he greeting us?". .. You're nothing. You don't have something.

Cahiers d'études Africaines , 2018

Abstract This paper argues for thinking about the relation between photography and exhumation as well as the potential for photographs to bring buried histories into the light. After the close of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there were still hundreds of unresolved cases of people who had been killed under apartheid. The Missing Persons Task Team was established to investigate these cases and has subsequently located and exhumed the remains of many activists. This article examines the case of Siphiwo Mtimkulu, an anti-apartheid student activist who was abducted and murdered by the security police in April 1982, together with his comrade, Tobekile “Topsy” Madaka. The remains of Mtimkulu and Madaka were located in 2007, ten years after the security police who murdered them lied at the Truth Commission about the facts concerning how they were tortured and killed. Engaging with photographs of Mtimkulu taken before his disappearance and those of his mother Joyce Mtimkulu, I argue that both physical and photographic remains have a particular resonance in the wake of the Marikana massacre of 2012 and the protests against the persistence of colonialism and apartheid that young South Africans held at universities across the country in 2015-2016. résumé Exhumer l’apartheid: la photographie, la disparition et le retour — Cet article vise à penser la relation entre la photographie et l’exhumation ainsi que le potentiel qu’ont les photographies à éclaircir des histoires enfouies. Après la clôture de la Commission pour la vérité et la réconciliation (the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission), il y avait encore des centaines de cas des gens tués sous l’apartheid. L’équipe de la recherche des personnes disparues (Missing Persons Task Team) fut créée afin d’enquêter et par la suite put localiser et exhumer les corps de nombreux militants. Cet article se penche sur le cas de Siphiwo Mtimkulu, un étudiant militant anti-apartheid, qui fut enlevé et assassiné en avril 1982 par la police, avec son camarade, Tobekile « Topsy » Madaka. Les restes de Mtimkulu et Madka furent identifiés en 2007, dix ans après que les policiers qui les avaient tués mentirent à la Commission sur comment ils avaient été torturés et tués. En s’engageant avec les photographes de Mtimkulu prises avant sa disparition et celles de sa mère, Joyce Mtimkulu, je soutiens que les restes physiques et photographiques se revêtent d’une résonance particulière à la suite du massacre de Marikana de 2012 et les manifestations contre la persistance du colonialisme et l’apartheid que les jeunes Africains du Sud ont organisées aux universités à travers le pays en 2015-2016. Mots clés : Afrique du Sud, Marikana, Siphiwo Mtimkulu, apartheid, exhumation, manifestation, militantisme étudiant, photographie, Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This dissertation explores four recent examples of video art by four South African women artists. It focuses on Jo Ractliffe’s Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting) [1999/2000], Berni Searle’s Mute (2008), Penny Siopis’ Obscure White Messenger (2010) and Minnette Vári’s Chimera (the white edition, 2001 and the black edition 2001-2002). I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life. This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence. A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. It considers the possibilities of art objects as sites that facilitate empathetic, critical and intellectually engaged encounters with historical trauma and violence in South Africa. The videos explored counter spectacle and didactic, and authoritarian, modes of representation. In the absence of a sustained and visible art historical narrative of the history of video art in South Africa, the study focuses on work representative of the earliest, documented examples of video art by women artists, which emerge out of the transition from apartheid. The tension between history’s relationship to objectivity, detachment and empirical knowledge, and its participation in subjective, imaginary, and performative processes underpins the study.

Art Blart, 2018

This text investigates how the act of photography visually writes trauma. Through an analysis of the context of images of death by artists such as Alphonse Bertillon, Robert Capa, Alexander Gardner, Walker Evans the paper ponders how the camera captures human beings ante-mortem, at the death point, post-mortem and vita ad mortem. It seeks to understand that line between presence and absence where life was there… and now death is in its place. Death was one step removed, now it is present. How does the act and performance of photography depict the trauma of death, this double death (for the photograph is a memento mori and/or the person in the photograph may already know that they are going to die). "The text of eternity that the photograph proposes, imparts and imposes a paradoxical state of loss. The secret of telling truth in a photograph is that the more truthful, "the more orgasmic, the more pleasurable, the more suicidal" the pronouncement of the perfect paradox (you are dead but also alive) … then the more we are strangled while uttering it. The language of deferral in the writing of trauma in death and the image becomes the dissolve that seizes the subject in the midst of an eternal bliss. In death and the image we may actually die (be)coming." Word count: 8,137

Image & Text, 2018

The focus of this article is a speculative argument on the relation between photography and testimony as one that situates the viewer on a particularly powerless, but responsibility-laden position. Articulating Nilufër Demir's viral 2015 photograph of Aylan Kurdi, and Walter Kleinfeldt's 1918 photograph of an unknown fallen soldier, as images bearing the marks of shifts in biopolitics, the article takes up on Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben, and reflects upon the possibility of addressing and responding to images beyond a moral level. As such, it inquires on the need to relate to images on a level that considers power relations. Ultimately showing that observers, or viewers, of photographs are necessarily tied to the unfolding of human history, no matter how distant they may be from its events, the article proposes a response to the need of assuming a political stance when facing images.

Press photography often reduces geopolitical conflicts from local or regional political disasters into isolated, simplified and safely communicable spectacles of atrocity. Images of non-Western women in particular regularly function as symbols of the degeneracy and hopelessness of the oppressed, obscuring social and political subjectivities. This article follows two case studies of press photographs portraying women, analysing gender as their key component. The main road of scholarship on photography capturing war and conflict has focused on the empathic responses of the Western audiences to the general category of "trauma photography", rather than on institutionally-distributed image-making that produces contemporary notions of identity, (non)citizenship and sovereignty. The goal of the article, however, is to point out how these representations, generating ethical and aesthetical responses, simultaneously function as normative devices producing the imagery of certain communities and mediating their distance from the audiences.

History and Theory, 2009

Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in exposé and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions during the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were represented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor "fictions" that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using angularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng's writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in postapartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng's work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-influenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly influential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed.