African Photography from The Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive

Press Kit

Unidentified photographer, Portrait of King Khama III, , early twentieth century

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive

Dates June 9, 2013 – May 17, 2015 Curator Tamar Garb

Historical Photographs by C. J. Aldham, Samuel Baylis Barnard, Barnett & Co, E. J. Bundy, Caney Brothers, B W. Caney, Crewes & Van Laun, Felix Coutinho, Coutinho Brothers, A. M. Duggan-Cronin, George T. Ferneyhough, A. C. Gomes & Sons, H. F. Gros, Gray Brothers, A. James Gribble, Kimberley Studio, Lawrence Brothers, T. Frederick Lewis, J. E. Middlebrook, William Moore, Henri Noyer, W. Rausch, John Salmon, M. Veniery, C. Vincenti, G. F. Williams, W. D. Young, and Unidentified Photographers Contemporary Photography and Video by Philip Kwame Apagya, Jodi Bieber, Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Kudzanai Chiurai, Samuel Fosso, Attilio Gatti, , Zwelethu Mthethwa, , Sabelo Mlangeni, Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Putter, , , Guy Tilim, Carrie Mae Weems, and Sue Williamson Opening Hours Thursday–Sunday By appointment and guided tour only. Contact: [email protected] Address The Walther Collection Reichenauerstrasse 21 89233 Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen www.walthercollection.com Facebook: facebook.com/thewalthercollection Twitter: @walthercollect

Contact Press Contact The Walther Collection Markus Müller/Bureau Mueller Maria Schindelegger Alte Schönhauser Straße 35 Tel.: +49 731 1769143 10119 Berlin [email protected] Tel.: +49 30 20188432 [email protected]

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive The Walther Collection is pleased to present Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, the third exhibition devoted to African photography and video art. This exhibition brings together late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, album pages, and books from Southern and Eastern Africa, set in dialogue with recent photography and video by contemporary artists who have engaged with photographic archives. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the legacy of anthropological and ethnographic visions of Africans, reimagining the poetic and political dimension of the archive, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The culmination of a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York, and the international symposium “Encounters with the African Archive,” co- organized by The Walther Collection, New York University, and University College London, the exhibition is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue edited by Tamar Garb. Distance and Desire unfolds in three thematic sections: Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin A juxtaposition of A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s The Bantu Tribes of South Africa and Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 introduces the concept of the photographic archive as both a repository of documents and an assemblage of representations. Duggan-Cronin, an Irish South African who lived in the mining town of Kimberley, set out to depict what he considered the disappearing indigenous populations of South Africa. His monumental study, entitled The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, published between 1928-1954, includes photographs, descriptive captions, and anthropological essays. In addition to presenting all eleven Bantu Tribes books, a complete sequence of photogravure plates from The Nguni: Baca, Hlubi, Xesibe (1954) will be on view, alongside a selection of vintage gelatin-silver prints by Duggan-Cronin, which had previously circulated as individual objects. In contrast to Duggan-Cronin’s renowned and contested ethnographic vision of African heritage, The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950 portrays the modern self-representation of African subjects. In the early 1990s, the artist Santu Mofokeng collected family studio portraits from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa and transformed the images into a slide show, complete with narratives about the sitters. He

also produced a series of gelatin-silver print reproductions of the portraits, which are on view together with a selection of the project’s original vintage prints and Mofokeng’s research notes. Envisioned as a “counter-archive,” The Black Photo Album challenges fixed ideas most often associated with images of Africans. Poetics and Politics The cornerstone of Distance and Desire is a presentation of previously un- exhibited vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, and album pages, produced from the 1860s to the early twentieth century. Extraordinary in range and style, these images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in Africa and the exceptional skill of photographers working in the studio and landscape. “Poetics and Politics” offers a remarkable opportunity to view the narratives that emerge from this African photographic archive, describing in particular the experience of the studio: the curiosity between photographer and subject, the emergence and circulation of types, the range of portraiture, the negotiations of costume and pose, and the will for self-assertion. The presentation investigates typical European depictions of Africans, from scenes in nature, to sexualized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in elaborate studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of , race, and identity. Original album pages of landscapes and ethnographic imagery are displayed alongside a series of carte de visite portraits of Africans, circulated in the 1870s from the Diamond Fields of Kimberley and popular “ethnic” post- cards from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The exhibition also features several double-sided displays of album pages, showing striking combinations of personal and stock images, and the juxtapositions of prominent figures in both African and Western contexts. Among over 150 images, the exhibition includes some of the finest examples of works by Samuel Baylis Barnard and the Lawrence Brothers of , George T. Ferneyhough and the Caney Brothers in Natal, Barnett & Co from Johannesburg, W. Rausch from Bulawayo, and G. F. Williams from Port Elizabeth, as well as images by unidentified and unattributed photographers. Contemporary Reconfigurations Centering on contemporary photography and video by African and African- American artists who have engaged with photographic archives, “Contemporary Reconfigurations” shows how a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era provides material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Carrie Mae Weems, in her powerful series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, appropriates mid-nineteenth-century anthropometric photographs of African- Americans, overlaying the images with poetic texts. Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, and Sue Williamson rework historic or ethnographic photographs

onto collages. Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, and Kudzanai Chiurai create exuberantly staged studio portraiture, using backdrops and sets to critique stereotypes and identities. Zwelethu Mthethwa and Zanele Muholi examine sexuality, costume, and ritual, while David Goldblatt’s and Jo Ractliffe’s black-and-white portraits portray mineworkers and former military personnel as they chose to been seen in “traditional” clothing. Sabelo Mlangeni’s photo essay “Iimbali” documents the reed dances of KwaZulu-Natal, showing the display of virgins vying to be chosen as brides. His series “Country Girls,” in contrast to the multiple visions of women posed “in nature” throughout the ethnographic archive, chronicles small- town transvestites who self-consciously perform their adopted identities for the camera. Pieter Hugo’s series “There’s a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends” examines ethnicity and skin tones through mug shots and Guy Tillim makes a typology of child soldiers training near Beni, in the eastern Congo. Jodi Bieber, in a reversal of previous voyeuristic visions of the black female body, presents women self-consciously posing in settings where they are in control of their own images. Working in video, Berni Searle performs as a statuesque deity engaged in domestic labor in Snow White, and Andrew Putter gives an indigenous voice to the effigy of Maria de la Quellerie, wife of the first Dutch settler in the area known today as Cape Town, in Secretly I Will Love You More. Together, through their work with the African archive, these artists pose compelling questions about identity and memory, leading to new readings of the exhibition’s vintage photographs.

About Tamar Garb Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London. She holds a BA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, ; and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Garb was the curator of Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2011) and Land Marks/Home Lands: Contemporary Art from South Africa at Haunch of Venison Gallery, London (2008). She has contributed to and authored a number of publications, including Gauguin: Maker of Myth (2010); The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (2008); The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814–1914 (2007); Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-De-Siècle France (1998); and Sisters of the Brush (1994). Garb lives in London and is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow 2012–2014. She will deliver the Slade Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2014.

Publication African Photography from The Walther Collection Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive

Edited by Tamar Garb

Distance and Desire is the first major publication to stage a dialogue between the ethnographic visions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth- century African photography and engagements with the archive by contemporary artists. Presenting an extraordinary range of portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, and albums from Southern and Eastern Africa, as well as recent photography and video art, the catalogue includes original thematic essays by leading art historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.

Among many diverse topics, the catalogue examines in-depth a series of cartes-de-visite from the Diamond Fields in Kimberley, the figure of the Zulu, the history of South Africa’s prominent studio photographers, A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s extensive ethnographic study The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, and the archive of elegant family portraits reproduced by the contemporary artist Santu Mofokeng in The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950. Distance and Desire also reveals how the African archive figures in the practices of contemporary African and African-American artists, whose compelling photography and video reworks the archive through satire or appropriation.

Distance and Desire is introduced and edited by Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London; and features a conversation between Tamar Garb and , with essays by Awam Amkpa, Jennifer Bajorek, Elizabeth Edwards, Cheryl Finley, Christraud Geary, Michael Godby, Erin Haney, Hlonipha Mokoena, Gabi Ngcobo, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Carla Williams, and Deborah Willis.

352 pages, 215 tritone plates 32 x 24 cm Cloth-bound hardcover with dust jacket ISBN 978-3-86930-651-3

Published by The Walther Collection/Steidl in March 2013

For review copies, contact: Steidl Verlag Public Relations and Press Claudia Glenewinkel Tel.: +49 (0) 551 4960650 Fax.: +49 (0) 551 4960644

About The Walther Collection The Walther Collection, based in Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York, is dedicated to researching, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing photography and video art. In 2010, the collection, which is supported by The Walther Family Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization, initiated a multi-year program investigating African photography and video. The inaugural exhibition, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, was curated by and opened in June 2010 in Neu-Ulm. The exhibition represented three generations of African artists from the 1940s to the present and focused on diverse formulations of portraiture, illustrating how artists have used portraiture to visualize changes in society by performing and constructing notions of the self, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The second exhibition, Appropriated Landscapes, curated by Corinne Diserens and opened in 2011, explored the distinct and varied histories of Southern Africa and its people. The exhibition considered the effects and traces of colonialism, war, migration, and industrialization on the landscape, and examined how architecture and spatial planning reflected the social order and ideology of in South Africa. Instead of looking at the traditional notions of the picturesque and the sublime, Appropriated Landscapes showed how complex layers of meaning are embedded in the physical attributes of a given space. Distance and Desire is the culmination of a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York and the international symposium “Encounters with the African Archive,” which The Walther Collection co-organized with New York University and University College London on November 10, 2012. Distance and Desire is the collection’s first endeavor to focus on historic photography. In 2015, the collection will embark on a series of exhibitions that examine the concepts of typology, taxonomy, and seriality in a cross-cultural exhibition bringing together works from Africa, China/Japan, the United States, and Germany. Beginning with a look at the collection’s focus on New Objectivity and the works of August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and , this exhibition explores how these practices have influenced artists around the globe and have formulated their varied approaches, in terms of both content and form.

Location The Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen The collection’s main exhibition venue is a four-building museum compound set in the quiet, residential streets of Neu-Ulm / Burlafingen in southern Germany. Three principal buildings—the White Box, Green House, and Black House—provide 10,000 square feet of gallery space to present the Walther Collection’s annual exhibition program. A fourth building on the campus accommodates administrative offices and a library. With the exception of the newly commissioned White Box, each of the buildings maintains the existing vernacular architecture of the area, while the interiors have been transformed into spare white-walled gallery spaces, proportioned to accommodate different scales of photography and video. Designed by the Ulm-based architectural firm Braunger Wörtz, the White Box is a light-filled, three-story minimalist structure that houses The Walther Collection’s main exhibition galleries. Featuring a glass-fronted foyer overlooking the surrounding landscape, the White Box echoes the size and shape of the other buildings on campus, with its main gallery extending underground to preserve the architectural integrity of the neighborhood. The expansive 5,000-square-foot space on the lower level, which is visible from a first-floor balcony, hosts thematic exhibitions; and a smaller, 1,500-square-foot gallery and reading room on the second floor presents new acquisitions and single-artist commissions. The intimate scale of the Green House, a former residential home, provides gallery space for small-format works, either for a comprehensive single- artist presentation or for comparative exhibitions between the works of two artists. Except for the remodeled interiors, consisting of two small-scaled galleries on each floor, the two-story house remains exactly as it was built more than half a century ago, with its façade covered in ivy, giving it its name. The Black House is a one-level, bungalow-style structure used for the presentation of serial, performance, and conceptually based photography. Without windows on three sides of the building, the interior space is divided into three separate galleries, lit by a glass curtain wall that allows natural light into the rooms. The Walther Collection Project Space in New York Located in the landmark West Chelsea Arts Building in New York City, The Walther Collection Project Space serves as an experimental exhibition venue that extends the Foundation’s mission and program to American audiences. The 1,750-square-foot space, which opened to the public in April 2011, hosts three focused exhibitions per year drawn from the collection, complementing the annual thematic exhibition in Germany and helping to foster an international dialogue about contemporary photography from around the globe.

About Artur Walther Artur Walther has been devoted to supporting global photography programs and scholarship for nearly twenty years. He began collecting in the late 1990s, focusing at first on modern German photography— including the industrial photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the documentary works of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) photographers such as August Sander—before expanding his collection to encompass contemporary photography and video from artists around the globe. The collection today includes one of the most important private holdings of African and Asian photography. In June 2010, Walther opened his collection to the public with the inauguration of the Walther Collection, a four-building museum complex set in the residential streets of Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen in Germany. Supported by the Walther Family Foundation and dedicated to promoting new scholarship through an in-depth exhibition and publication program, the Walther Collection extended its mission to U.S.-based audiences with the opening of a new exhibition venue, The Walther Collection Project Space, in New York in April 2011. Walther serves on a number of photography committees at cultural and educational institutions in New York, including the Architecture and Design Committee of The , the Photography Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Photography Committees of Vassar College and Bard College. He is a Board Member at the Storefront for Art and Architecture and at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Walther has chaired the exhibitions committee at ICP for ten years and spearheaded the launch of the museum’s first Triennial of Photography in 2003. Born in Ulm, Germany, Walther graduated from the University of Regensburg and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. He lives in New York City.