Normal View Dyslexic View
Conversation
Photography and history: a view from Southern Africa
Professor Patricia Hayes*†
,
phayes@uwc.ac.za
in conversation with Professor Elizabeth Edwards‡
Abstract
In this ‘Conversation’ piece, Professors Patricia Hayes and Elizabeth Edwards discuss the relationship between photography and history as it manifests itself through the photographic legacies of Southern Africa. The specific historical experience of the Southern Africa has given rise to a realisation of the potential of photographs as drivers for historical thinking and analysis, the way photographs ‘move history forward’. The Conversation addresses major questions that resonate through the discourse and politics of global photographies—about the conditions of visibility, the problematics of Western photo-theory and of the language of photographic and historiographical analysis as viewed from the Global South.
Keywords
photographyhistorySouthern Africaphotographic practiceapartheidhistoriographyElizabeth Edwards: Professor Patricia Hayes, I have found your work some of the most consistently interesting and innovative that explores history through the prism of photographs. It’s why I wanted to have this conversation, so thank you for accepting. I want to begin by asking you about the extraordinary way in which you’ve developed research and teaching in visual history at the University of the Western Cape. Where did it emerge from?
Patricia Hayes: It’s a real honour to be part of this conversation, so many thanks to you and the British Academy. To answer your question, it emerged largely from collaboration. We started a postgraduate module called Visual History in 1997, which is a very long time ago, soon after I joined the University of the Western Cape and while I was completing a collaborative project on the Namibian photographic archives called The Colonising Camera (Hartmann et al. 1998). UWC was formerly a black working-class university under apartheid, but it became the site of radical curriculum experimentation in the 1980s.
This carried over after apartheid ended in 1994, so I entered a history department which had developed a number of critiques of South African social and labour history, but where colleagues were also willing to interrogate the very philosophical premises of the discipline of history. It really was rather extraordinary. Some of the premises that were being questioned were the way history operates with positivist and epistemological underpinnings that get obscured. This had a tendency to truncate discourses, whether oral or textual, in order to provide quotations that would support an argument that had already been reached, instead of allowing for the possibility that it could be the other way around.
EE: Bringing photography and the oral into the centre of that analysis and letting them drive it?
PH: Exactly, and that kind of shift was absolutely welcome. This was influenced by subaltern and gender studies, postcolonial theory and critical race thinking. There was a willingness to think about history from other angles, which was also, as I saw it, a way to re-engage with the potential strengths of the discipline. It promoted critical empirical research that’s very careful, but also allowed room for conceptual thinking. I should also say that the field of African history, in which I was trained, had benefited from big debates over the importance of oral history and oral tradition in accessing the African past. This was very important given the nature of the colonial archive and the authority of the written word, which made the writing of African history very difficult. There was already a long-standing anti-colonial critique within the discipline. In addition, the debates at UWC around social history showed how divorced academic history was from the sites where other non-elite histories are produced. Visual history emerged alongside a new programme in public history, which developed an African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies that worked a lot with community museums.
We, in visual history, also benefitted from getting students into our classroom who were recruited from all over Africa, including artists, curators and activists, who really embraced visual history and its blend of theory and practice. In that mode of teaching, our students consistently take up the camera and learn photography, initially analogue and later digital, which promotes their visual literacy very quickly and in some strange, unfathomable way also helps them to articulate concepts. It somehow puts pressure on your thinking. That process is very interesting. These students are quite comfortable with questions like, ‘What can photographs offer us when we come to think about history and historiography?’ On the other side, in terms of theory, the global literature on photography itself, which has been growing apace, is very rich. For us, it’s been very provocative because, being centred on Western Europe and North America, it’s given rise to our own modes of critique and further study. Gary Minkley and myself, who started visual history, were able to gather together students who’d gone on to do doctorates with strong visual history components for our edited volume, Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (Hayes & Minkley 2019). We had a cohort, which together with a few postdocs who also worked with us, meant that the book almost put itself together as there really was a critical momentum.1
EE: There’s a sense that the very specific nature of late-20th-century South African history has made it particularly fertile ground for examining these deep historiographical problems that actually reach very much wider than South Africa itself.
PH: I think so, and bringing in photographs was also something new here. There’s something really productive about thinking from the limit or periphery. Frameworks that present themselves quite innocuously as universal, but are fundamentally Eurocentric, often come undone and don’t quite work when you carefully research our African situations and archives. You start to trace the architectures of the argument that are rooted in certain assumptions that apply to those European or American contexts and not to us. That demystification is actually very exciting and opens the door to new ideas.
EE: You’ve written very lucidly in the introduction to your Kronos journal volume about the ways in which Euro–American photo theory effectively shuts down African or Global South voices (Hayes & Gilburt 2020). You take the example of Roland Barthes and the near-reification of the ideas of punctum and studium. This has skewed the thinking about photography in relation to history in certain ways that has tended to marginalise the vital content which has to be understood, and I mean vital in both senses. Roland Barthes said somewhere else that the realists, the analogue people, will always win out. In a way, he’s right. It’s really important because that’s what you’re saying. Photographs offered a way in to a disenfranchised history that could not necessarily be articulated in other ways.
PH: I became a great enemy of the punctum, which became quite a joke in my classroom and beyond. It’s the way that that became such a condensed mode of thinking about photographs and photography amongst a very wide readership. It became the portal through which lots of people entered and could say something quickly and then leave the debate.
EE: I’ve seen that so many times. I also think punctum is so profoundly misunderstood. It’s used as if it means detail, and it doesn’t. It means the fracturing of the social surface and the opening up of different possibilities within the image. This reduction and condensation just obliterate that possibility.
PH: Yes, you’re absolutely right. You put it beautifully. I think when you feel that discomfort with how it’s being used so reductively, often to stand in for an affective response and to exonerate the writer from thinking about the rest of the photographic image, It actually makes you read the text much more carefully than you might have done otherwise—to find out if that’s really all there is to it. I think that’s the fate of a lot of very good literature in these days of hasty academic production. We don’t read carefully enough anymore. Being at the limit also slows you down and returns you to a more painstaking mode of thinking. Surprisingly, I found that there’s a lot to be said for the studium, the inscribed content of the image, its informational aspect which Barthes says is only ‘of general interest’ (Barthes (1993: 26).)
EE: Do you think it’s also forced us into a position where we read images too quickly? We put them in certain categories. Colonial photography is a perfect example. It’s a colonial photograph; therefore it sets in train a whole series of assumptions that actually, when you start digging and reading the image closely, don’t necessarily apply.
PH: That’s right. If we think again partly about the punctum and the studium, but also those old art historical terms of denotation and connotation, because of the affective force and the immediacy of photographs, there seems to be a way that certain associations are triggered, and they are interpretive ones. Actually, if you again slow down and look very carefully through the contents of the photograph, there could be things in the background or hinterlands of the image. There could be little bits of contingency that then actually shift what it is you might have wanted to say so quickly because of the interpretive availability that you might have assumed from the very beginning. I agree with you there.
EE: Siegfried Kracauer once said that the energy of all images is at the frame or edge, and he’s so right.
PH: That’s a wonderful quotation.
EE: It’s one that is always echoing in the back of my head—what’s happening at the edge, as a document, but also theoretically and analytically. This brings us to something we touched on a moment ago. We’ve just been talking about the quest for a language. This has had very important implications that have inflected through my own work when I write about things like presence and event, for instance. I would like to widen the conversation at this moment beyond specifically southern Africa, because this is a hugely important historiographical thread in your work.
You’ve made two related comments. The first about the imbalance of theory, which we’ve just been talking about and which afflicts writing about both photography and history. Secondly, I wonder if you see a time when the imbalance of theory might be tilted in the other direction. As we just said, I always find it very incongruous: we talk about global photographies, yet we hang on to those theoretical models we’ve just been discussing, which in many cases, were developed in a very specific European politics of the mid-20th century. I’m thinking of people like Walter Benjamin, for instance. I wondered if this is related to that sense of belatedness that you write about in the introduction to Ambivalent, that somehow African histories are always in that waiting room. We’re back with Kracauer here! (Kracauer (1994: 191–217))
I wondered if it’s the work of photographs not only to move that history out of the waiting room into the mainstream, but also to give us a language which we can really use to think about global photographies. Just as photography is often looped back, almost inadvertently, into the language of art history, we get global photographies, which are de facto looped back into categories of Western analysis, whether they’re historiographically appropriate or not. Have you any further thoughts on that, because I think ‘belatedness’ and ‘imbalance of theory’ are really important aspects of your work?
PH: Those are really huge, tremendous questions. Here I need to pick up on a few points and maybe talk a little bit about the development of vocabularies.
One of the learning processes that I went through that was tremendously formative had a rather long background. My university became the custodian of a very important anti-apartheid archive called the Mayibuye Collections, which had tens of thousands of photographs in it. It represented a lot of the solidarity campaigns mediated by the International Defence and Aid Fund in London. The fact it was deposited at our university meant we had a teaching and research resource. We’re still only scratching the surface of this amazing archive that is also very idiosyncratic. Its presence, and the postgraduate teaching, inspired an oral history project in the early 2000s, where myself and some graduate students went around trying to interview photographers who were part of that movement. I must say, we started out with a touching innocence about what we might be able to access, overlooking the fact that what people say at a certain time is going to be quite particular. It might not be the same as what they said twenty years earlier, or what they would say twenty years later. That’s been a big learning curve.
We interviewed about twenty photographers, and I learned a great deal from that process, as well as from looking at their work with them. They started to help me gain some visual literacy.
At the same time as apartheid ended, South Africa’s borders became much more porous. This was also because the country demilitarised and wasn’t attacking other neighbouring countries. A lot of immigrants came in from other African countries, and the cities, especially, began to change enormously in the post-apartheid era. They became cosmopolitan, or Afropolitan, as some people put it. Some photographers were also tracking that, and one of the synergies I found where vocabularies started to emerge was in my conversations with David Goldblatt. He was tracking some of the informal economies and the way public spaces were changing in the cities, especially Johannesburg. I really want to thank him because I used to be very tentative. He would say, ‘What do you see in the photograph?’ and I would come up with something. Then I would say, ‘But I’m not visually literate. I’ve had no training.’ He said, ‘No, it’s alright.’ I got quite encouraged by that and found that I could draw on a very different kind of literature, which was coming from my undergraduate teaching on the post-colonial African city.
That period had an absolutely remarkable literature. (Notable here are Simone (2004) and de Boeck & Plissart (2014).) It was about the originality of African cities, the creativities, and not seeing people as suffering from poverty and the various detrimental conditions that applied, but actually seeing the ways cities could work in alternative ways to how Western perceptions would regard it. That was very emboldening. I found this helped me to articulate some of the things I sensed in my conversations with Santu Mofokeng, for example, who is a very subtle photographer (Hayes 2009). I’m very grateful to that particular literature and for the way that my responses were landing and taken up by photographers, who would ask me to engage further.
EE: Did that give you a new conceptual language with which to address photography?
PH: Yes, for certain things. There were also concepts that photographers themselves had come up with on their own that they wanted to talk about. One of David Goldblatt’s concepts was about visual desire, which he called ‘wishful seeing’. This ‘wishful seeing’ was one of the most problematic things for him as a photographer. He used to talk about how he would have a mental image in his mind. He would go into a certain situation, and if that mental image started to obtrude and affect the way he photographed what was in front of him, then he saw it as problematic. It’s about coming with your pre-existing assumptions and thinking you know what you are looking at. He had quite a lot to say about that (Hayes 2015a). I also spent some time engaging in interviews with Mozambican photographers whose main work was in the same period. That was also very interesting because it was a counterpoint for the more austere documentary practices in South Africa, which were influenced by Anglophone practitioners. The Mozambican photographers were more influenced by Italian neorealism and French photographers, and so on. They often came with very poetic ideas that they had actually drawn from their poets and writers. There was a cultural ferment at certain periods that’s very rich.
One of those concepts was synthesis. That, of course, is an old Marxist concept, but one which had been revitalised by photographers like Ricardo Rangel and José Cabral to talk, for example, about the way African cities collapsed boundaries between urban and rural and where people had a fluency between spaces. (See Hayes (2013a), also Hayes (2013b).) That’s just to say a little bit about the originality of new concepts that can come from some of those photographers who are also thinkers. They might be modest about what they might be able to write, but they are actually intellectuals in their own right.
There are two more concepts that have come up recently, and which my students get very excited about. One of the things we’ve talked about previously, and I’ve written about, is the way that the big documentary decade of the 1980s ended and things shifted after the end of apartheid (Hayes (2012, 2015b)). New photographic experiments were valorised, especially in the vibrant new gallery economy. We’ve had lots of previous discussions about how there’s a shift towards a more aesthetic language and appreciation, even though I would insist it’s always underpinned politically. There’s been a further shift that I’ve noticed in the last few years, which you see in curators, photographers, artists and filmmakers. I haven’t explored the literary world enough, but it’s undoubtedly there as well. There’s an intergenerational dynamic that is happening, where creative people are drawing on the knowledge systems of their mothers, grandmothers and other ancestors. They are seeking to draw on indigenous or African philosophical concepts that they think are not only in danger of being lost, but that they really need.
I have two examples of that. There’s some beautiful work by Nomusa Makhubu who is working collaboratively with the Evaton community in Johannesburg and their photographic archives. She’s working with a concept that comes from the Zulu language, ukuzilanda, which means to reach back into the past to find something (Makhubu 2024). There’s also Hugo ka Canham, the author of Riotous Deathscapes, which has made a big impact. He works with another term called ukwakumkhanya which could be translated in multiple ways. He talks about looking askance, and how people will screw up their eyes to block out too much light so that they can actually see properly. It’s about filtering and protecting yourself from too much exposure or hypervisibility (ka Canham 2023). It argues a certain canniness and the way the visual sense is working in a totally embodied way, together with other senses. It reminds us of how we should not isolate seeing from all the other sensory things with which it is working.
EE: I think you’re absolutely right. I think one of the problems we’ve had is that photography is shoved to the side as something marginal and difficult, when what we need is a complete intermedial integration in how we think about photography as a historical actor. I really like what you’ve just described about reaching back into the past and looking askance. These are really wonderful concepts that could be transformational in the way that one might write history through the photographic image. Almost everyone I’ve ever worked with has had some sort of sense of that reach back into the past, and this is often glossed as nostalgia. It’s not. It’s the reverse. It’s something profoundly empowering in the present and future.
I think this is another area where Western theory, with its obsession with the past, nostalgia and death, has done no favours to majority ways of thinking about photography. Those questions are not necessarily the ones that formulate most people’s responses to photography. It’s about a future being and what they pass on, reaching back into the past, but bringing it into the future. I myself see photography as something profoundly future facing. The way it is being absorbed into digital and social media cultures (and has been for a long time now) is actually about the present, but also about the future.
PH: That’s right. Photographs can be very sticky things. They are carried together with all sorts of other materials from the past. They leave a visual residue which can be lodged in the memory, though obviously tweaked and looked at askance. There are several things you’ve raised there that I will try to respond to. One of them is this whole question of futurity. We’ve had some dialogues in the past around my work on South African funeral photographs. During the anti-apartheid period, funerals were the one space where people could assemble and it was possible for photographers to operate without too much harassment. In the essay I wrote on this, I argued that in times of protest and conflict, photographs could move histories forward in very dynamic ways (Hayes 2021).
EE: I find that concept enormously strong, this notion of a dynamic photographic presence which is not necessarily archival. ‘Just being there’ moves the possibilities of those histories into new spaces. It’s something I’ve undoubtedly absorbed from your work—that photographs move histories along. I’m interested in considering in which direction they move them along.
Is it destabilisation, rupture, or coherence? What is the space it moves it into?
PH: Let’s take the example I worked with previously, of Jürgen Schadeberg’s photographs of the funeral of the people shot dead at Sharpeville in 1960 (Hayes (2021: 292–4)). There is a particular kind of movement that happens at the time, in the moment, not around photographs circulating, but the actual making of the photographs. A political protest, demonstration or funeral is where the participants are aware of the presence of photographers and cameras; it means that there’s not only the immediate public as the audience. There’s another set of publics beyond that who are potentially distant. There’s a futurity. People in and around the scene being photographed implicitly understand that this is going to go somewhere. That it’s going to annoy the government. You’re not just being looked at by the police, dangerously, but also potentially by the world. That could make a difference somewhere further along the line, though maybe not immediately where you’re actually facing a potential brutality.
In that particular set of photographs, Schadeberg took to the air so that he could actually convey the scale of that funeral with dozens and dozens of coffins lined up in rows. It was really awesome. It helped to create a consciousness outside South Africa that something was very wrong. It did a lot of damage to the South African state. The knock-on effects and direction of movement, galvanised the government to pass legislation that banned the major opposition parties, such as the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress. It became illegal to belong to them. This led to imprisonments and many going into exile. It led to the beginning of the armed struggle, so there’s a cascade. I’m not saying that the photographs alone did that, but they participated in a tailspin of the violence. They extended and expanded the moment, and made it possible for many other things to be unleashed.
One has to be careful, however, not to just read back in a teleological way. Another key photograph was the very famous one of Hector Pieterson taken by Sam Nzima on the first day of the Soweto student protests against Afrikaans language in schools in June 1976. It shows the martyred boy being carried by his friend Mbuyisa Makhuba, with his sister Antoinette Sithole running alongside. To just call it iconic is so flat and unhelpful. We have to understand the dynamics, the contingencies the students faced, including police bullets, and that Nzima also faced in the moment and which surface across several frames. While Pieterson lost his life, the photograph which appeared in The World and then beyond cost Nzima his career and sent Makhuba into exile and disappearance. As an image the photograph continues to mean new things to new generations and it prompts different questions. (See Kerkham Simbao (2007), also Mamdoo (2018).) And I realised from my interviews with photographers of the 1980s generation that that specific photograph from Soweto 1976 actually prompted a number of them to become photographers because they saw what it was possible to do with the camera. To me, that is really interesting.
EE: Can I bring this back to history and what you’ve described so eloquently? The tailspin and that expansion, and the extraordinarily integrated work of photography within the whole political landscape of what’s happening—how do we deal with that as historians? The other thing I want to bring in here concerns your funerals paper, where you write about photographs that were taken, but never even developed. We have the photographic act. We have, in a slightly different context, a visual desire, but they are almost stillborn. Is there a stillborn history in undeveloped film, these latent histories possibly just waiting to come out?
PH: Let me try to answer in the following way. All the rich photographic documentation and photojournalism that was produced in the struggle against apartheid, plus the sense of surfeit that led some photographers to hold back on developing their films, has to do with the peculiar degree of visibility possible in South African cities—and I say cities deliberately, because this all connects to a very specific history of urbanisation. The political landscape into which photography was integrated by the 1980s comes from a white settler paradigm that already introduced racial segregation very early in the 20th century. Modernisation programmes were designed to benefit the white settler communities in the country. This meant that South Africa underwent quite a rapid industrialisation and urbanisation especially after World War 2, and apartheid rode on the back of this.
EE: Was photography part of that modernisation drive that South Africa decided it wanted to use photography in a certain way?
PH: Yes, there’s a very rich archive, for instance, called the South African Railways and Harbours Collection.2 There were various photographers who were commissioned by government to show what later became known as Separate Development under apartheid. The country was becoming urbanised and there was tension around trying to exclude the majority of the population from access to the cities, except to sell their labour on very disadvantageous terms.
Cities are places of visibility, proximity and high density, so they favour the development of modernist photographic forms. This actually then worked against apartheid repression. When it came to the sparking of trade union activity in the 1970s, the student uprisings from 1976, and the take-off of the mass democratic movement in the 1980s, there’s access to what’s happening for increasing numbers of photographers who are attracted to join the struggle in this way, or to become professional. I think this layer of photographers from the anti-apartheid period were often embroiled in the activities of the political activists, especially the photographers who were part of the Afrapix collective. (See Hayes (2011), also Hayes (2007).) They either came from the same communities, or, if they were from a white middle-class background, took pride in crossing the boundaries, throwing in their lot with the oppressed and being accepted by those communities. There was maybe a little bit of romanticisation there, but there’s an embroilment that’s really very specific.
Incidentally, that makes South Africa rather different from the liberation struggles in other African countries. In southern Africa, for example, there were guerrilla armies operating in rural areas who needed invisibility (Hayes 2020) That’s in very great contrast to what I would describe as these great civic mobilisations that happened in South African cities. Photographers had access to that, so there’s a kind of quickening through the making and circulation of photographs. Photographs are feeding into the making of posters and T-shirts that people wear and which then reappear in the photographs, so your organisation grows, etc. It’s really fascinating, and that’s a very specific moment.
EE: Can I go back to the photographs that are taken and not developed? I’m very interested in this because it does come back to these patterns of visual desire, and the external assumption of what is equitable representation in a certain set of political circumstances. What gets developed, shown, circulated and selected, and what doesn’t and continues to sit in its little black canister?
PH: Yes, this probably brings us to the question of realisation of saturation and hypervisibility, and possibly a sense of overproduction because of certain types of photographs being needed at certain times, which could change again very quickly. From the mid- to late-1980s, there was a large production of funeral photographs. As I think we both know, photographic visuality can be very effective in an immediate sense, but such impact can also pass very quickly. If the same genre is repeating itself, it can lead to certain kinds of visual fatigue. We do have this phenomenon of photographers deciding to put aside work, not as superfluous, but as probably surplus to the need at the time. It’s then a very interesting question of what becomes of that in the future. There’s a wonderful quotation by Michel-Rolph Trouillot about ever-shifting moments ‘of retrospective significance’ (Trouillot (1995: 26)). What turns out to be historically important at one time might become irrelevant later on, but can be resuscitated. The situation is ripe for this to happen with anti-apartheid photographs.
But to turn to the colonial photographic archives, which have been the focus of my most recent work in Namibia and Angola. I think it also speaks to what you’re saying about the inertia of certain photographs, the existence of which may perhaps be obscured, forgotten or put away somewhere and divorced from the circumstances in which they were made. ‘What kind of history is a photograph?’ is a question that you have put so forcefully at different times. That is where I see something really interesting. There’s a different kind of movement if you think of those more inert collections, as opposed to the photographs of the anti-apartheid struggle that were part of that tailspin and the mill that was going round.
Here we are dealing with quite a different category—of colonial photographs that often end up in museums as part of ethnographic collections. To come back to this question of thinking history with photographs, such photographs suffer from a number of problems. One of them is obviously de-contextualisation, especially if they are relocated to European museums where they often sit in separate areas from the other artefacts that might have been collected with them, and the testimonies, accounts and objects that they might have been part of. But I see something really productive in the work of trying to reconnect them with the milieu in which they were made, and the other kinds of materials that were made at the same time, which historians generally refer to as ‘sources.’ That is where we come back to those important and rather disciplined historical skills of doing the digging, looking for the detail and having the patience. Do that, and you start to see that unexpected things crop up.
Through extended work on those kinds of images, I’ve come to appreciate something else very forcibly. This concerns theory. The arrival, circulation and storage of African photographs in imperial metropoles is usually analysed in terms of bringing what is far way into the midst of colonial publics and institutions. This is not invalid, but it is troubling, because it confines the phenomenon of ‘new worlds opening up’ to a spatial issue. The failure to think about time is where one can clearly notice the road of photographic theory branching away from Africa, and new worlds (as it were) closing down. Perhaps I’m stretching things to put them in alignment, but it’s also the same language of revealing something that was never seen before, of ‘new worlds opening up,’ that within the European context has dwelt on the chronophotographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Their motion photographs broke down human and animal movement into those little micro-instants which the natural eye cannot follow, and were said to have blown open something that was never revealed before.
Conveniently, Muybridge and Marey are associated with Walter Benjamin’s wonderful concept of the optical unconscious, a concept arising from the micro-temporalities of the photographic operations they each developed that enabled something that had not been visible before to surface, and to be theorised. It’s all about temporality. Time is attached to those experiments, whereas spatiality is automatically attached to the Africans. For me, a big part of the problem of those ethnographic photographs is that time is always taken out of the consideration. They are literally arrested, and are outside civilisation, often Christianity, later modernity. That problem persists in certain residual ways and the cost is high. In effect, it is stealing theory from Africa. I think that one of the big tasks we have to do is think much more about photographic temporalities and make that an equal playing field across global photographies.
EE: I want to go back to something you just said about looking at things in their milieu, and temporality. This so often gets reduced to a question of context around photographs, but we’re looking at something much more dynamic and complex. If we’re really going to work with these photographs as historians, we have to think about them as spatio-temporal moments within networks of connectivity. A lot of work going on around the restitution of colonial photographs, with all the problems that entails, are actually exercises in these temporal–spatial networks of connectivity. That’s what we’ve got to put back in place, because the debate has become very dichotomised. We’re looking at is something very much more fluid. In all the work I’ve done over the years, this has certainly been the overriding impression that I come away with from conversations with people.
PH: I agree with you about the reflex action to just provide context being really problematic. Again, we come to the more opaque parts of the historical practice, which is that every context actually needs its own context, and so it goes on. It’s not something stable. It’s also constructed and fabricated, and can be undone. It’s not stabilising the photograph to just resort to putting it in a context.
EE: Some of the most interesting work on photography going on at the moment is the dismantling of context in order to enable it. We go back to your point about photographs that move histories on. If you dismantle certain forms of context, which are often very much assumed, that’s the moment at which photographs move history on.
Before we finish, I just want to come back to something we touched on at the very beginning. We’ve discussed photography as a new consciousness in history, and you’ve given some very eloquent examples of why this is. It’s quite clear that photography, or photographs, carry an enormous weight historiographically. Why is it that historians are so resistant to thinking about the work of photographs beyond the reductively evidential?
PH: That’s unanswerable! I think that if historians had more language to talk about the way the discipline works, and interrogate it, and were more self-conscious about the frameworks and concepts they use, that would make them more open. I do think that if you work with photographs, it really helps to ask those questions about history. For example, I think most historians are really comfortable with the idea of the notion of reconstruction. All too often, that’s assumed to be chronological, even though people might make a few critical remarks about linearity. We have a real problem there. As you’ve noted a number of times, photographs are seen to be against narrative. I think that’s a very useful point to think with. Quite often, if you are busy with your historical reconstruction and are working with texts and maybe some interviews, you’re building a narrative. Then you come across a photograph and you realise you cannot just subordinate it as an illustration to what you’ve already decided.
It throws up a really interesting problem. Because, often, it might say something different about the situation which is the subject of your reconstruction. It can stymie you and fracture your narrative. I think that’s actually the point of creativity. That is when you are led off at different angles or tangents, and are forced to think more conceptually about the situation in the photograph and what it is that you were trying to reconstruct through other means. We should find ways to be comfortable with that. To be angular historians instead of chronological ones, and maybe allow for constellations, assemblages, collages and collisions. It’s not about making a neat, seamless totality by filling in gaps. That’s all part of the problematic language of many historians. Filling gaps is a terrible idea!
EE: I think collisions are a wonderful place to stop. Thank you very much indeed, Patricia. It’s been a huge pleasure and much food for thought. Thank you.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is of the siege of COSATU House, headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, 22 April 1987. Photo courtesy of Eric Miller.
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HayesP. (2013a), ‘Our nightly bread:” women and the city in Ricardo Rangel’s photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950s–1960s)’, in
Lowndes VicenteF. & Dias RamosA. (eds), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan), 441–464, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_16
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1
Research and postgraduate teaching in Visual History have been supported by the DSI/National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory (Unique Grant 98911).
2
Now called the Transnet Heritage Library, at https://www.transnet.net/RenderPage.aspx?id=7929552 (accessed 6 January 2026).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a02
Published on: 23 March 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 342
Article download count: 16
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Hayes, P. with Edwards, E. (2026), ‘Photography and history: a view from Southern Africa’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(1): a02 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a02Crossref
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July 2023
From the ‘culture wars’ to reparative histories Gurminder K. Bhambra, Elizabeth Edwards, Margot Finn, Fiona Williams
The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.
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Nso’ traditional religion and climate forecast: a critical photographic analysis Noela Kinyuy Banla
In light of contemporary ecological challenges affecting our globe, it is increasingly acknowledged that indigenous knowledges are vital for local communities to understand, deal with, and respond to, climate change. Against this background, this article focuses on indigenous religious practices among the Nso’ of the Bamenda Grasslands of Cameroon. The article specifically analyses photographic representations of religious rituals that have shaped, and continue to help, the Nso’ people to accurately forecast climatic conditions and adapt/take precautions. This analysis demonstrates that through photographic narratives the rule of traditional religion in climate forecast can be valorised and exploited to add to the knowledge of climate challenge adaptation. The findings also demonstrate methodologically the role and importance of photographs as a medium for preserving collective and societal memories. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan van Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)
22 May 2024
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