Wits University Press
Photography And History In Colonial: Shades of Empire
Photography And History In Colonial: Shades of Empire
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Lorena Rizzo examines the relationship between photography and history in colonial southern Africa from the late 19th century until the 1960s. She argues that photographs preserve and recreate the past in the present, but that they also have value for how they evoke, at once, the need for, and the limits, of historical reconstruction.
Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa is a rich and in-depth study of the relationship between photography and colonial history at the turn of the 20th century. Lorena Rizzo highlights the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicates rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, and the subject and the object. Rizzo argues that rather than understanding photographs primarily as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can also value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction.The work is rich in detail. Readers will encounter photographs that range from prison albums from late 19th century Cape Town; police photographs from German Southwest Africa (Namibia) in the early 20th century; studio portraits commissioned by African women and men who applied for identity documents, travel permits and passports in the 1920s and 1930s; South African dompas photographs from the 1950s and 1960s; to African women collections assembled in the locations of Windhoek and Usakos in central Namibia, and aerial photography in the Eastern Cape in the mid-20th century.
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Publication year: 2019
Pages: 302
Language: English
Publisher: Wits University Press
ISBN: 9781776144815
