Intimate Ancestors in Santu Mofokeng's Black Photo Album

“Live Transmission” Intimate Ancestors in Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950

Alexandra Dodd

n 2011, the music video for South African singer/rapper/ Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997; Figs. 1, 4–5), a series of nine- producer/DJ Spoek Mathambo’s “Control” (2010) went teenth-century colonial portraits of black South African families, viral on YouTube, garnering hundreds of thousands retrieved from archival stillness, digitally reworked, and exhibited of hits across the globe (cover and Figs. 2–3). A deeply by South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, one of the most hybrid sonic brew that draws on contemporary African important and influential African photographers living today. and British postpunk references, the song is the fourth single from Mathambo’s debut album, Mshini Wam (2010).1 With “Chasing shadows” Iits driving, danceable bass line and eerily distorted vocals, “Con- Like Mathambo’s deranged music video, Mofokeng’s urban trol” is a cover version of British postpunk band Joy Division’s landscapes go beyond straight political and social commentary “She’s Lost Control” (1979) and reinterprets the gloomily frenetic into meditations on existential madness and the absurdities of mood of working-class Manchester in the 1970s as a “darkwave living. Born in 1956, he started taking pictures in the early 1980s. township house” anthem for the a new generation of rebels and After a short period as a street photographer and some jobs in dance-floor dissidents. Mathambo’s song trans locates the origi- the dark rooms of newspapers, he completed his first photo- nal, overlaying the grim mood and atmosphere of grimy postin- graphic essay, Train Church,4 in 1986 and went on to become dustrial North West England with the edgy energy of township one of the most respected photographers of the struggle years, life in twenty-first-century South Africa. But much more haunt- as a member of the Afrapix collective and a photographer on the ingly post-Victorian than the song itself is the music video, which newspaper New Nation.5 He worked as photographic researcher was shot on location in a derelict boarding house in Langa, Cape for the Wits Institute for Advanced Social Research6 for nearly Town. Produced by South African photographer Pieter Hugo and ten years, and as a result, became an early proponent of research- cinematographer Michael Cleary,2 this video has subsequently based photographic practice in South Africa.7 been featured at numerous film festivals across the world, estab- Mofokeng’s photographs capture the visual landscapes that lishing Mathambo as the “heir apparent of Afro-futurists such as shape the daily lives of working-class black South Africans, Sun Ra, Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Rammellzee, Del Tha focusing on key elements and recurrent themes, like the sordid Funky Homosapien, Andre 3000, DJ Spooky, and Kool Keith” ironies of billboard advertising or the experience of commut- (Leonard 2012). But at the same time that the video is heralded ing. His sustained photographic enquiry into spiritual belief and as being “Afro-futurist,” it was shot in self-consciously retro black practices resulted in the evocative series Chasing Shadows (1996– and white and draws on some decidedly vintage aesthetic tropes. 2006). Mofokeng’s explorations of landscapes invested with Like an amped-up postmodern version of Charles Dickens’s Oliver spiritual significance form part of his wider enquiry into space, Twist (1838), it explores the milieu of township cults, street preach- belonging, and the political meanings of landscape in relation to ers, and teen gangs.3 In both its hybrid African-Gothic aesthet- ownership, power and memory. ics and its hypermediated global reception, the “Control” music In 1989, his interest took a new turn when he started to ques- video provides some powerful cues for my reading of Black Photo tion the commodification of his work by the art world and began

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 52 3/3/15 3:31 PM 1 Santu Mofokeng (b 1956) Slide 8/80 (1997) Photo: © Santu Mofokeng; courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 53 3/3/15 3:31 PM 2 Still image from the music video of Spoek people, photographs contain the “shadow” of the subject, they are Mathambo’s “Control” (a cover version of the Joy Division classic), shot in Langa, Cape carefully guarded from the ill-will of witches and enemies. In other Town, and directed by Pieter Hugo and families they are being destroyed as rubbish during spring-cleans Michael Cleary. because of interruptions in continuity or disaffection with the encap- Photo: courtesy Nthato Mokgata, Michael sulated meanings and the history of the images. Most often they lie Cleary, and Pieter Hugo hidden to rot through neglect in kists, cupboards, cardboard boxes and plastic bags (Mofokeng 2000).

In a lecture in conjunction with its exhibition at the Walther Collection Project Space in New York City, Dr. Jennifer Bajorek told her audience that when Mofokeng showed his own works working in a more consciously research-driven mode. He started (his early photojournalism documenting township life, religion, asking black families if he could make photographic copies of and land), his subjects did not like them at all. He began col- their old family photographs covering the period 1890–1950. lecting The Black Photo Album pictures—late-nineteenth and State-sponsored publications of the time, like the 1936 tourist early-twentieth century studio photographs commissioned by brochure Native Life in South Africa, had seemed intent on rep- everyday folk who wanted a record of themselves—in order to resenting black people as resistant to change, perpetually locked discover what types of images his neighbors in fact preferred into old rural and tribal cultures. Mofokeng wanted to recover and thereafter only exhibited his own photographs interspersed a different sense of the past, to show the complex modernity of with these archival images created at the instigation of people in black family life, so he set about convening a counter-archive his community. The differences in the depictions are obvious, of that has gathered resonance both within South Africa and inter- course, but so are the time warps built into the project. Multiple nationally over the past two decades. temporalities converge when the records of the original sittings “These are images that urban black working and middle-class (represented by the faded original prints) jostle with the contem- families had commissioned, requested or tacitly sanctioned,” porary vision of an artist interrogating the meaning of his fore- writes Mofokeng in the text that accompanies the exhibition of bears’ photographic experience. Black Photo Album images (whether as a slide show projection Before Mofokeng’s intervention, these images ran the risk of or as photographic prints). being dismissed or ignored as evidence of pathologies of bour- They have been left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes geois delusion. And indeed many of these pre-apartheid inte- hang on obscure parlour walls in the townships. In some families grationists were property owners who had acquired a Christian they are coveted as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narra- mission education and lived a life in manner and dress very tives about identity, lineage and personality. And because, to some similar to those of European settlers. Despite the political and

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 54 3/3/15 3:31 PM economic limitations they faced, by the beginning of the twen- active self-determination—self-authorship—can be recognized tieth century many of them had become “self-consciously across a century of colonial administration and apartheid rule. politicized,” actively spurning or questioning the policies of the The desire not just to be seen, but to be seen through a self- colonial regime, yet it was by no means the case that they rec- selected mix of current fashions and shifting global styles, is as ognized their oppressed status only by the early decades of the potent as it ever was. In this affirmative, self-determining spirit, twentieth century. On the contrary, black intellectuals had been The Black Photo Album photographs prefigure a well-populated expressing their “disenchantment with the unfulfilled promises trajectory of African studio portraiture ranging from the famed of the enlightenment” throughout the late nineteenth century Malian portraitists Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, to Oumar (Mokoena 2011:21). The Black Photo Album images reflect the Ly of Senegal, Ghana’s James Barnor, and, more recently, Cam- sensibilities, aspirations, and self-image of a particular class of eroonian photographer Samuel Fosso.9 Stephanie Jason writes, black South Africans at a threshold moment in history, giving “These photographers adopted the studio photography practiced contemporary viewers an inkling of the complex allegiances they from the mid-nineteenth century by European ethnographers. were negotiating through their everyday life choices. But they updated it and put their own stamp on it. [They] took There is something simultaneously alluring and threaten- the method of ‘documenting’ Africans that European photogra- ing about these photographs of these late nineteenth- and early phers practised in the colonies and made it their own” (2013:5), twentieth-century South Africans who chose to be depicted in a review of an exhibition by Nigerian photographer Lakin wearing modern European-style dress and fancy hats. Are these Ogunbanwo, who follows in the footsteps of these renowned stu- images evidence of “mental colonization”8 or do they challenge dio photographers who captured Africa’s popular culture as the prevailing impressions of Africa and Africans based on a damag- winds of independence swept across the continent. ing legacy of colonial photography? It is this haunting double- “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the ness that I explore here, although ultimately there is no answer objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recog- to this question. The pictures represent neither and both—cap- nize as modern,” writes Susan Sontag in her seminal work, On turing instead a sense of the irreducibly contradictory life worlds Photography (1973:3). knotted together in conditions of entanglement. For a work of Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, research-based photographic practice, the centrality of the ques- seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version tion is key. The resolutely open-ended spirit of Mofokeng’s proj- of its utility, the camera record incriminates … In another version ect is enshrined in the prevalence of the question as the mode of its utility, the camera record justifies … The picture may distort; of address in the interstitial texts authored by him that punctu- but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist, ate the sequence of photographs in this series. “Who are these which is like what’s in the picture (Sontag 1973:5). people?” he writes. “What were their aspirations? What is going to happen to those aspirations at the end of twentieth-century In the instance of The Black Photo Album collection, the cam- South Africa?” These words, on slide 66/80 of The Black Photo era record justifies. As visual traces of the affective power of this Album slide projection, appear in plain white type on a black self-fashioning impulse, these photographs refute mainstream background, recalling the inter-titles in early motion pictures. colonial photography’s denigrating anthropological and ethno- This textual reference to a bygone cinematic trope that predates graphic framings of Africa and Africans as being caught in a sound in film emphasizes the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth passive state of naïve and timeless primitivism,10 “moved by the century origins of these antique images, highlighting the proj- blind force of custom”, “resistant to change” (Mbembe 2001:4). ect’s mode of production as one of archival recovery—which Unlike myriad official archival photographs of anonymous sub- entails retrieval, selection, digital reworking, and renewed circu- jects denied the honor of personal inscription, these are named lation, as opposed to origination. portraits, “which appear to have been either commissioned or sanctioned” (Greenberg 2012:7) by the sitters themselves. For The self-fashioning impulse the first part of “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the Afri- “When we look at them we believe them, for they tell us a lit- can Archive”—a three-part exhibition at the Walther Collection tle about how these people imagined themselves. We see these Project Space (2012–2013)—curator Tamar Garb drew atten- images in the terms determined by the subjects themselves, for tion to this dissonance by setting Mofokeng’s collection in dia- they have made them their own,” writes Mofokeng in the exhi- logue with A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s ethnographic study The Bantu bition text. The sense of self-determination about which he Tribes of South Africa (published in eleven volumes between 1928 speaks—the active fashioning of self-image by the nineteenth- and 1954). “It was logical to begin the series with [this] compari- century subjects of these self-styled portraits—prefigures the son,” says Garb in an interview. “Mofokeng’s project is about voguish tone of Mathambo’s comment over a century later. negotiating the archive and constructing a counter-archive, Attempting to account for the deep syncretism of his signature reacting against the dominant view—exemplified by Duggan- sound, he said: “We are trying to push ourselves into develop- Cronin—of Africans as part of nature, primitive, outside of time, ing an honest and authentic voice in sound that really repre- and uncivilized” (Garb 2012). Yet, unsettlingly for many viewers sents us as postmodern, post-apartheid, post-everything poster entrenched in the populist reductions of postcolonial critiques boys raised on a steady diet of TV, internet and Chicken Licken” and tit-for-tat post-apartheid race binarism, the Black Photo (Leonard 2012). The objects and trappings of contemporaneity Album photographs evidence a seemingly contradictory plea- have clearly changed drastically, but a familiar drive towards sure in the surfaces and textures of Victorian modernity and the

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 55 3/3/15 4:18 PM interpolation of these objects of material culture into the culture ing” (Gikandi 2000:170), his key point is that they also strove to of mores, tastes, and lifestyles of the colonized. go beyond their own conditions of possibility. While rehearsing Describing a tactic by means of which colonial subjects imi- the key tropes of Victorianism, they were also trying to adapt tate the language, dress, politics, or cultural attitudes of their col- the moral culture of the nineteenth century to their own histo- onizers, “mimicry” is often viewed in colonial and post colonial ries and experiences as colonial subjects, gesturing to “a post- literature as an opportunistic pattern of behavior: one copies Victorian frame of mind” (Gikandi 2000:170). Although not the person in power, because one hopes to have access to that always visible, this conceptual contestation was significant to the same power oneself. Historically, it is often constructed as some- instigation of black nationalist thought in the nineteenth cen- thing shameful—a source of derision and the basis for colloquial tury. Throughout the period of Queen Victoria’s reign, colonial insults, like the commonly used term “coconut.” Frantz Fanon, subjects worked hard “to transform colonial Victorianism into for example, mocked the affected pretentiousness of Martini- a discourse of their own liberation from imperialism” (Gikandi can “been-tos” in Black Skin, White Masks (1967). At the same 2000:168). In this sense, argues Gikandi, Victorianism was not a time “mimicry” remains a key concept in thinking through the discourse or ideology that was simply imposed on the colonized; relationship between colonizing and colonized peoples, and in it was also a set of ideas and ideals that were deployed by colo- Homi Bhabha’s formulation of the notion in Of Mimcry and Man nial subjects as a means to a different end—their own freedom. (1994), the term is freighted with subversive power. In Bhabha’s But that freedom proved a long way off and the subjects conception of it, mimicry is a kind of performance that exposes of these photographs would go to their graves, as would their the artificiality of all symbolic expressions of power. Bearing in children, before anything resembling freedom was eventually mind Bhabha’s emphasis on the subversive power in this form wrought for black South Africans.11 “The images in this book of doubling or transcultural drag, Mofokeng’s collection might record a specific historical catastrophe. They depict the rise and also be read in relation to Terrence Ranger’s review of Wolfram fall of a class of educated, urban, Christian Africans in late nine- Hartman et al.’s The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Mak- teenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa,” writes histo- ing of Namibian History (1998). Whereas the latter had presented rian James T. Campbell in the epilogue, titled “African Subjects,” colonial photography from the position of the colonial “gaze,” which appears after the collection of family photographs in the Ranger’s alternative take is that Africans in the colonial era man- book The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950 (Camp- aged to reclaim their subjugated visual selves by appropriating bell 2013). Campbell’s observation recalls Hlonipha Mokoena’s the colonizing camera to their own ends (Ranger 2001:171). account of the life and times of the kholwa intellectual Magema In this sense, the Black Photo Album photographs also directly Fuze, in which she writes that, “by the end of the nineteenth recall Simon Gikandi’s arguments that “colonial subjects did not century one could talk of an incipient class of educated and lit- seem to detect any implicit contradiction between Victorian erate Africans, especially in what was then the Cape Colony” ideas on questions such as tradition, morality, and progress and (Mokoena 2011:20). She notes that: their own programme of liberation and self-identity” (Gikandi Although these individuals moved into various professions and occu- 2000:181). pations, as the products of mission education they collectively shared In their garden parties, their newspapers, schools, and universities, an identity of being both Christian and educated. They were amak- the African elite in places as far flung as Cape Town and Lagos dis- holwa. Being an ikholwa was a political and social, rather than just played their Victorian identity and frame of reference as a badge of a religious identity. Above all by converting to Christianity and sub- honour and celebrated their Victorian world picture as a mark of scribing to progressive ideals of private property ownership, individ- their arrival into the modern world, the world of civility and civiliza- ual rights and the Protestant work ethic, the amakholwa within the tion … On the surface black Victorianism was indistinguishable from limited political sphere of colonial governance acquired, according its metropolitan version: its vocabulary was that of paternal empire, to their own understanding, the rights of British subjects … Yet, no its axioms were those of the civilizing mission, its evangelicalism was sooner were these rights gained than they began to be eroded. Once as legendary as that of colonial missionaries, and its patriotism was the kholwa began to claim their rights as British subjects and to peti- properly English (Gikandi 2000:168). tion for their extension, successive colonial governments in the Cape and in Natal began, incrementally, to qualify and abrogate such rights But this was just the visible surface of things. Gikandi calls it as the kholwa had acquired (Mokoena 2011:20). “the embarrassment of Victorianism” (2000:169) and goes on to explore its productive contradictions, asking why these black And so commenced what Campbell calls the “historical catastro- colonial subjects felt impelled to express their identity through phe” that began with reneging on promised rights and culminated the idioms of Victorianism. He weighs up several possible expla- in the centralization of white rule, the unification of South Africa nations, one of them Kwame Anthony Appiah’s reading of them in 1910 and, ultimately, forty years of apartheid rule. It is almost as being “hopelessly imprisoned in a certain Eurocentric dis- impossible to take in the Black Photo Album series—to gaze into course on literacy and civilization, a discourse that accepted the the eyes of the young couple posing in their Sunday best in front Enlightenment’s view that Africa was devoid of the capacity for of a vase of fresh-cut flowers or at the dapper young gent with his literacy and by extension rationality and moral culture” (Gikandi boater hat, bow tie, finely twirled moustache, and pipe—without 2000:170). He accepts that Appiah’s reading is valid, but argues this history somehow playing itself through the photographs in that it is incomplete. While acknowledging that many Afro- variant notes of retrospective hypothesis and foreboding. At the Victorians were “interpellated by Victorian culture, carrying the same time that these images evidence self-determination, social baggage of post-Enlightenment Eurocentricism and racial think- mobility, and buoyancy, they are also suffused with a deeply mel-

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 56 3/3/15 4:18 PM 3 Still image from the music video of Spoek Mathambo’s “Control” (a cover version of keng’s collection was acquired by Tate Modern in London as the Joy Division classic), shot in Langa, Cape part of the museum’s new drive to extend its reach across the Town, and directed by Pieter Hugo and world by expanding its collection to areas outside Europe and Michael Cleary. Photo: courtesy Nthato Mokgata, Michael North America, including the Middle East, Asia, Latin Amer- Cleary, and Pieter Hugo ica, and Africa.14 During 2012, the images were featured con- currently in “Chasing Shadows: Thirty Years of Photographic Essays,” a retrospective curated by Corinne Diserens at WAM (Wits Art Museum) in Johannesburg,15 and in Part I of curator Tamar Garb’s “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the ancholic form of sociopolitical hindsight. “Looking at the images African Archive,” a series of three shows at the Walther Col- of tennis players, pipe-smoking dandies, gentlemen in riding lection in New York investigating historical and contemporary breeches, ladies clutching parasols, brides and grooms and, later, approaches to images of Africa.16 At the 2013 FNB Johannes- flapper girls in collars and ties, one is reminded of the identity burg Art Fair, Maker—Mofokeng’s representative in South shift of Jews in Germany on the eve of the Nazi Holocaust,” writes Africa—exhibited a selection of rare vintage silverprints hand Matthew Krouse. “Somehow history would soon teach them that printed by him between 1995 and 1997, prior to his presenta- prejudice does not bow to assimilation. Beyond the myriad images tion of The Black Photo Album as a slide projection installation of happy families proudly posing for the camera lies something for the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. Moreover, the Steidl/ dark and brooding” (Krouse 2013). Walther Collection publication The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950 (Mofokeng 2013),17 was shortlisted for the Paris diffusion/remixing: remaking self and hisTory Photo–Aperture Foundation Photo Book Award 2013 and won Mofokeng began working on this ongoing project of archival gold in the Kategorie Fotogeschichte of the Deutscher Foto- restitution in the late 1980s, and the Black Photo Album series buchpreis 2014. It would be fair to say that this collection of was first exhibited in the late 1990s, perhaps most notably photographs has been in high circulation in recent years, the in 1997 as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale, “Trade object of fevered public debate, discussion, and desire chan- Routes: History and Geography,” curated by Okwui Enwezor,13 neled by some of the most powerful agenda-setting cultural a watershed event in the global uptake of South African con- institutions in the European-African-American contemporary temporary art. Almost two decades have passed since then, art nexus. The peak diffusion of this collection gives rise to the yet these photographs have retained their social magnetism. question: What fuels this widespread contemporary fascination If anything, they have resurfaced quite dramatically on the with these archival photographs of black colonial subjects in international exhibition circuit in recent years. In 2010, Mofo- Victorian costume?

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 57 3/3/15 3:31 PM 4 Santu Mofokeng (b 1956) Slide 10/80 (1997) Photo: © Santu Mofokeng; courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 58 3/3/15 3:31 PM A productive cue is offered by Neelika Jayawardane in an Cumulatively, the mediation of these images in the present article on the programmatically diasporic blog site Africa Is a tense invests them with a “live” effect. Not only have they been Country. Instead of routinely consigning all responses to the actively introduced into a transnational field of “live transmis- African photographic archive to “the overused phrase, the sion,” but their circulation and reception in the present moment ‘colonial gaze’,” she writes, forges a bridge to an elapsed moment in history—a time that has I would rather find ways to exuberantly engage with that all knowing passed and might have been forgotten about if it were not for gaze and accompanying epistemologies on Africans … In fact, young these photographs transmitting a charge of renewed public feel- digital curators and photographers already are messing with those ing to that bygone era. It is possible that this live charge might stock images of the native and the African, using Tumblr, Pinterest, and stem from a sense of agency or capacity for redress in virtu- WordPress. That living digital archive may be where we need to head to ally connected audiences—a feeling that they can do something next: these movable locations offer us platforms where we can actively with these photographs: post them, share them, “like” them, engage with problematic archives—it is here that we can remark upon, write back at them, talk back at them, project into them, visually question, and remake self and history (Jayawardane 2012). remix them, defile them, honor them … In this regard, the public staging of these “problematic archives” presents contempo- One point that emerges from Jayawardane’s observation rary viewers with a rare opportunity. As Jayawardane writes, “it relates to the democratic, dialogic nature of online social is here that we can remark upon, question, and remake self and media platforms and the live, performative public space they history” (Jayawardane 2012). provide for people to take their personal and political concerns in relation to this body of work further—not just in discursive, phoTograph and ghosT linguistic terms, via blogs, articles, and online commentary, Thus far, I have focused on the implication encoded into the but also visually, via graphically driven platforms like Pinterest, word “live” that the object being described is electrified, charged, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube. Her phrase “messing powered, or active. Employed in relation to performances or with these stock images” testifies to an online, open-source cul- broadcasts, the word “live” also gives the sense of being not ture of visual licentiousness governed by an excitement in the recorded but personal, in the flesh, which is pertinent to the idea innovative fertility of the viral remix rather than respect for the of these images being instances of “aesthetic embodiment.” How- sanctity, purity, or copyright of the original. This global media ever, driven by the mystic tenor of this project and by Mofokeng’s phenomenon has been written about by David Shields (2010) sustained commitment to photographing the spiritual aspects and and others, and is also the subject of New York-based film- rites that shape everyday life in South Africa, there are further maker Kirby Ferguson’s four-part video series, Everything is a connotations to the word “live” that I am keen to excavate here. Remix (2010–2013). In this series, Ferguson claims that noth- In its most animate sense, “live” refers to the fact of being alive, ing is original and illustrates the interconnectedness of creative having life, breathing, being sentient. In this sense, it is the oppo- production, demonstrating how most celebrated creators— site of being “dead,” expired, departed, extinct, lost, lamented—or, from Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs—borrow, steal, and transform. when used in relation to language itself, obsolete, defunct, disused, Remix culture allows for and actively encourages derivative abandoned, forgotten—being not modern or current. Bearing the works to be forged through the combining and editing of exist- fullness of these meanings in mind, I argue that these photographs ing material objects to produce new ones—and thrives on the perform a similar function to the nineteenth-century séance, stag- transformation of old media into new media (Ferguson 2010– ing moments of desired contact between the living and the dead. 2013). Considering the folkloric emphasis of my core argument In reanimating memories that were in threat of obsolescence, in relation to the ritual power of these artworks to facilitate the activation of these photographs builds a bridge between the social transformation, it is also worthwhile noting here that departed and the sentient—establishing a third space of pastness folk tales, songs, art, and poetry exist in a constant state of that has potency and charge in the present. revision and transformation across time through the folk pro- Although it is possible to seek for meaning in their broader cess, in much the same way in which this process is currently context, some of the photographs that comprise The Black Photo unfolding online. Album are freighted with eerie silences and absences—an abid- Contemplating the current fervor of curatorial interest in these ing sense that these are not the sitters themselves, but photo- images in relation to the viral popularity of Spoek Mathambo’s graphic surrogates for the human beings who were once living, African-Gothic music video brings to mind the chorus from breathing human beings like ourselves, but who are now gone another Joy Division track, “Transmission” (1979)—the title of from this world. As incomplete historical residues or haunting this article, “Live Transmission,” is borrowed from the lyrics of traces of their subjects, these portraits are not dissimilar to the that song. In the context of the song, which was written in the spirit traces of the departed. “When Walter Benjamin discussed 1970s, the phrase “live transmission” refers to a radio broadcast, the vanishing auras of artworks in the age of mechanical repro- but here I am adopting it in a more technologically immediate duction, he was alluding to just such spirits,” writes Paul Landau sense to describe the social effect of the twenty-first-century (2002:23). recuperation of these archival photographs and their dissemi- Recognising a spectre presupposes its superannuation as natural nation via current circuits of public display and programming, meaning in life. The aura of a person means either personality or which feeds into a secondary circuit of online articles and social ghost, does it not? In Africa, these are often kindred concepts: the media discussion groups.18 essence of personhood and the chimerical reflection of the out-

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 59 3/3/15 3:31 PM ward self. It was frequently the second phenomenon, the human dation of South Africa 2014), a situation met by an initial two image, that was thought to survive after death as a “ghost.” In Zulu, decades of counterproductive government policy in response for instance, “isithunzi” means reflexive self, double, or image, and to the epidemic. This death-steeped19 social climate might offer is often given as “shadow.” When it was used in ways that mission- some insight into the Dickensian overtones at play in Math- aries recognised as referencing the past, the same notion became ambo’s “Control” video, which features a group of young town- “ancestor” (idlozi). Similar to “isithunzi,” the word “modimo” in Tswana located a person as a fading but ever more powerful and ship boys under the spell of an evangelist preacher in a white inclusive memory, a ‘shade’. Note the association between image suit. With a Christian cross embroidered into the preacher’s tie, and self in these ideas … In many African languages, the word for angels, tombstones, hell fire, and brimstone, the video’s grave- photographic ‘negative’ is the same as for “ghost or dead spirit,” yard-gothic aesthetic is unmistakably Victorian. But the baptis- and that photos have been in many places integrated into ancestor mal ritual of being dunked in water references African Zionist veneration (Landau 2002:23). practices, while the white pigment on the boys’ skin references Xhosa initiation ceremonies. Replete with eye-rolling posses- Firstly, it is fascinating that in this discussion of the relation sion, epileptic fits, and zombie dances, the video is high-energy, between image and self, photograph and ghost, Landau turns to beat-driven, and ultra-contemporary. It is also deeply syncretic, the word isithunzi. Isithunzi (“shadows”) is the title of the cen- its aesthetics drawing freely on a combination of Christian and tral installation of Nicholas Hlobo’s Umtshotsho (2009), which animist traditions, Victorian and African tropes. In this sense, features eight ghostly figures in a darkened room. Some are free- the video again recalls The Black Photo Album collection. My standing, some are seated on a couch in the parlor—not unlike point here is that, whether it is through the medium of litera- the sitters in the Black Photo Album collection. The uncanny ture (Dickens), photography (Victorian postmortem photogra- echoes across these two bodies of work lend credence to the idea phy and cartes de visite; The Black Photo Album photographs) of the subject as ghost and the artwork as medium, but also, in or video (Spoek Mathambo’s “Control”), aesthetics play a key their shared parlor-room settings, recall the hovering presence roll in mediating people’s responses and reactions to the dead— of the Victorians. When Landau makes the observation that particularly in times or places that are saturated in a culture of “photos have been in many places integrated into ancestor ven- death. Reflecting on the recurrent theme of death and dying in eration,” he makes it in relation to African cultures, but it might Charles Dickens’s writing, John Kucich writes: “Dickens’s undis- equally apply to the Victorians, whose elaborate mourning ritu- guised fascination with death reflects an entire social climate, for als involved jewelry, ornate cemeteries and, more significantly the Victorians invented cemeteries, mourning stores, and burial here, photography. Far from an occasional morbid afterthought, clubs” (1980:59). This might equally apply to contemporary Victorian postmortem photography was a common practice that Soweto or Capricorn Park. came into currency after the invention of the daguerreotype in But there is another Victorian writer whose pagan prose per- 1839, when portraiture became more affordable and common- tains even more hauntingly to the notion of aesthetics serving place. These photographs might have included the corpse alone as a vector of communication between the living and the dead: or with the family. In “spirit photography,” which focused more the Victorian realist writer Thomas Hardy. The clue lies in the on the mourner than the mourned, “the basic composition of title of the recent Walther Collection exhibition that showcased each is the same: a centralized sitter (the camera’s focal point) Mofokeng’s collection. When asked how she arrived at the title, with a ‘spirit’ hovering to the left or right of the frame” (Cad- “Distance and Desire,” curator Tamar Garb responded: waller 2008:14). Since “physical displays of grief were undesirable The title came to me very intuitively, as a way of distilling a huge in both men and women” (Cadwaller 2008:16), these photo- amount of material in two suggestive terms. Distance invokes travel, graphs gave mourners a way to grieve, while assuring them that geographic dichotomies, estrangement, otherness, and separation in there was an afterlife. Postmortem photographs served as keep- time. Whereas desire implies proximity, closeness, affect, and unful- sakes to remember the dead, most especially infants and young filled longing. Both of these terms are in play in this series of exhibi- children. The popularity of this practice is not surprising con- tions in multiple, open-ended ways. The title raises questions of who sidering the prevalence and visceral immediacy of death during is distant from whom and what is near to where, opening up the rela- the Victorian era, when life expectancy rates were low and infant tionship between past and present, near and far (Garb 2012). mortality rates high. With limited recourse to medical assis- tance or safe hospitals, Victorians mostly had to attend to their But bearing in mind my reading of The Black Photo Album own dying family members within their households, so death project as an instance of post-Victorian embodiment, it is appo- and dying were an integral part of their lives. For those who had site to note here that Distance and Desire is also the subtitle of J. dealt so directly with the death of a relative, “highly convention- Hillis Miller’s landmark study (1970) of thematic unity in the life alized social customs and funerary rituals eased the transition and works of Thomas Hardy who, like Dickens, was fiercely criti- from the deathbed to the bed that is the grave” (Wheeler 1994:5). cal of many aspects of Victorian society. M. Lynn Seitz writes, From burial clubs to home care, the prevalence and social Miller evaluates Hardy’s main interests—music, painting, archi- immediacy of death in the Victorian era recalls contemporary tecture, local Dorset customs, and things of a funereal or psychic township practices in relation to death and dying. South Africa nature—as they relate to his narrative point of view … The narrator is has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS compared to any other simultaneously at one with the thoughts and emotions of the charac- country in the world, with 5.6 million people living with HIV ters, and intimate with the minutiae of their everyday lives, past and and 270,000 HIV-related deaths recorded in 2011 (Aids Foun- present, over which he hovers like a cosmic ghost. Miller explains this

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 60 3/3/15 3:31 PM 5 Santu Mofokeng (b 1956) Slide 32/80 (1997) Photo: © Santu Mofokeng; courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 61 3/3/15 3:31 PM as desire on Hardy’s part to conceptualise historic time and eternity entanglement that was intimate and embodied—as close and artistically, to “bring into the present that which always seems at a personal as cloth touching skin. While acknowledging that the distance” because “to be conscious is to be separated; which is to say colonies provided “a porno-tropics for the European imagina- that if a person, real or fictive, is conscious of himself, he has there- tion—a fantastic magic lantern of the mind into which Europe fore separated himself from the world of man in which he is forever projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (McClintock doomed to play a part (Seitz 1970:359, my italics). 1995:22), perhaps there is also some progressive potential inher- Seitz’s observation regarding Hardy’s interest in “things of a ent in the sensuousness of difference. But any hint of excitement funereal or psychic nature” recalls my own arguments (Dodd at the thought that our ancestors might in fact have been into 2014) regarding the retrospective suppression of the pagan, folk- each other is quickly undercut by an attendant sense of melan- loric aspects of English nineteenth-century working-class cul- cholia at the way that things did turn out. “Are these mere sol- ture, and how the animistic, communalistic elements of settler emn relics of disrupted narratives, or are these images expressive culture rarely translate into popular postcolonial accounts of of the general human predicament?” asks Mofokeng in his inter- South African history. Driven by an insistent sense of an entan- stitial text. Rather than providing any answers, these ghostly gled South African inheritance of superstition, magic, and belief, portraits leave the viewer with further hovering questions. What I argue that The Black Photo Album functions in a similar way if history had played out differently? What if this integration- to Hardy’s prose—enabling contemporary viewers to “concep- ist spirit had been nurtured rather than policed? What kind of tualise historic time” and “bringing into the present that which mixed moderns would be we now? seems at a distance.” Moreover, there is at play in these images a certain “transgressive seductiveness” (Gikandi 2000:180)—an Alexandra Dodd is an independent writer, editor, and researcher. Ener- gized by the interface between visual and literary culture, she has worked attractiveness that stems from the pride and confidence with on a range of public realm projects, from newspaper and magazine report- which the stylish sitters in these portraits have chosen to rep- age to mixed-media installations and monograph essays. She holds an MA resent themselves. The contemporary circulation of this series (Creative Writing) from Concordia University and recently graduated with in relation to Andrew Putter’s Native Work series (2013), which a PhD in Literature at the University of Cape Town, where she is a research was exhibited in tandem with Black Photo Album as part of the fellow in Archive & Public Culture. She has contributed to several books, aforementioned “Distance and Desire” exhibition, highlights including David Goldblatt: Photographs (Contrasto, 2006), Sam Nhlen- the ideologically fraught pleasure associated with seeing nine- gethwa (Goodman Gallery Editions, 2006), The Fire Walker (Fourthwall, teenth-century black bodies enrobed in white Victorian cos- 2011) and Hotel Yeoville (Fourthwall, 2013), as well as to catalogues on tume, hinting at a disavowed and underwritten level of historical the work of Frances Goodman, Ruan Hoffmann, Gabrielle Goliath, Joanne Bloch, Kate Gottgens, and others. this [email protected]

Notes photographic researcher at the Mofokeng was, inten- expansion of the Imperial powers, whose policies were tionally or not, at the centre of one of the earliest South justified on the basis of a presumed racial and cultural 1 The album’s title riffs on the popular Zulu African examples of enabling photography as a research superiority (Ellingson 2001:249–323). struggle song “Umshini Wami” (“bring me my machine practice” (Bester 2012). 11 Although they are often conflated in a South gun”). Formerly sung by members of Umkhonto 8 This is a question Mofokeng poses in the inter- African context, the freedom to vote should not be con- we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National stitial text that punctuates the images in the slide pro- fused with freedom in a broader sense: freedom from Congress, this struggle anthem is now more strongly jection installation and in the Steidl/Walther Collection want; freedom to act, speak, move or think as one wants associated with the persona of current South African book, discussed below. without hindrance or restraint … In this regard, aluta president Jacob Zuma and is often sung at rallies 9 Until fairly recently, there were very few his- continua—the struggle continues. attended by him. tories of the creation and deployment of photography 12 Mokoena’s biography of Magema Fuze is 2 https://www.youtube.com/ by Africans in everyday contexts, but this is changing discussed in the introduction to my dissertation in a watch?v=d1CfJIySqEE with the emergence of texts like Hudita Nura Mustafa’s section subtitled “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Victorian 3 It features a cast made up mostly of local neighbor- “Portraits of Modernity: Fashioning Selves in Dakarois Doubleness and Colonial Modernity.” hood boys who run their own dance troop, Happy Feet. Popular Photography” (2002), in which she reiter- 13 For further discussion in relation to “Trade 4 Note how the title of this photographic essay ates the reversal of the photographic lens and writes Routes,” the second Johannesburg Biennale, see the con- tethers together the secular and the sacred—a mode of the great importance that indigent women in Dakar clusion of Dodd 2014. of representation that is core to my arguments here in attribute to photos of themselves arrayed in finest bor- 14 The Tate’s fairly recently adopted transnational relation to these works performing the function of a rowable couture. Two other recent texts that explore acquisition policy is discussed further in Dodd 2014. “secular séance.” photography as a vector for self-assertiveness and social 15 This Johannesburg showing was the fifth itera- 5 Founded in 1982, the members of this photogra- mobility in everyday African contexts are Terry Kur- tion of the exhibition, which originally opened at the pher’s collective and agency were committed to photo- gan’s Hotel Yeoville (2013), to which I contributed the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2011, before travelling to Swit- graphic practice as a form of activism. opening essay, and Marie-Helene Gutberlet and Cara zerland, Norway, and Belgium. 6 The Institute was then under the leadership of Snyman’s Shoe Shop reader (2012). These are but three 16 Interestingly, Part I of “Distance and Desire” the trailblazing social historian Professor Charles van examples within a multiplicity of texts that constitute (Sept. 13–Nov. 17, 2012) coincided with “The Rise and Onselen, the author of an exhaustive study of the life this emerging field of scholarship. Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy and times of the arch criminal Joseph Silver, who may 10 During the second half of the nineteenth cen- of Everyday Life,” curated by Rory Bester and Okwui well have been Jack the Ripper. The Fox and the Flies tury, Europeans began to distance themselves from the Enwezor, at the International Center of Photography (2007) is a social, political, and economic history of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Enlighten- (ICP) in New York (Sept. 14, 2012–June 1, 2013), and trans-Atlantic underworld from about 1890 until 1918. ment notion of “romantic primitivism.” The aesthetic some of Mofokeng’s documentary photographs were on 7 In his critique of the Wits Art Museum iteration and rhetorical trope of the sentimentalized “primitive” view as part of the ICP exhibition. of “Chasing Shadows: Thirty Years of Photographic ceased to be employed as a moral reproach to offset the 17 The book includes a full reproduction of The Essays” (2012), the Mofokeng retrospective curated by decadence of the over-refined European. Instead, a new Black Photo Album slide projection, comprising eighty vCorinne Diserens, Rory Bester writes: “… Diserens technologically driven concept of human history came slides, along with a number of the original vintage misses some of the value of such documents in connect- into force whereby representations of native peoples and images from which the slide-projected installation was ing photography, circulation and meaning. Not enough their traditions were increasingly used as a symbolic produced. It also contains examples of some of the field is made of Mofokeng’s nearly ten years of working as a foil to highlight the accomplishments of Europe and the notes originating from the research compiled by Santu

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150226-002_52-63_CS6.indd 62 3/3/15 4:18 PM Mofokeng while working on this ongoing project, as Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks: The Afro-Futurism’s Heir Apparent.” Mail & Guard- well as an extensive epilogue by James T. Campbell of Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. New York: ian. http://mg.co.za/article/2012-12-14-spoek-math- Stanford University. Grove Press. ambo-afro-futurisms-heir-apparent; accessed Feb. 5, 18 The “Distance and Desire” exhibition, for Ferguson, Kirby. 2010–2013. Everything Is a Remix 2015. example, was accompanied by a symposium exploring [video]. 4 parts. http://everythingisaremix.info/watch- Mbembe, Achille. 2001. “Time on the Move.” In On the African photography presented by the Walther Col- the-series/; accessed Feb. 5, 2015. Postcolony, pp. 1–23. Berkeley: University of California lection in collaboration with New York University and Press. University College London. 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