Visual Communication

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Gestures of defamiliarization Joni Brenner, Alexander Horsler, Molemo Moiloa, Paula Munsie, Stacey Vorster and Tim Zeelie Visual Communication 2010; 9; 51 DOI: 10.1177/1470357209352951 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/1/51

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visual communication VISUAL ESSAY

Gestures of defamiliarization

JONI BRENNER, ALEXANDER HORSLER, MOLEMO MOILOA, PAULA MUNSIE, STACEY VORSTER AND TIM ZEELIE University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT

One of the problems with teaching African photography in an urban Johannesburg-based classroom is the tendency to teach the histories and practices of photography in Africa as if they were somehow separate from us. This separation or disjunction is partly because, as Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe point out in their book Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008): ‘until very recently, Johannesburg described itself as the largest and most modern European city in Africa’ (p. 18), and consequently South Africans very often fail to see themselves as African. The title of this visual essay – ‘gestures of defamiliarization’ – is taken from their book. To overcome this problem of separation, Joni Brenner introduced an active learning project designed to involve students directly in the thorny realm of subjectivity, identity and representation. This essay was written together with five students who participated, and excelled, in the course. It was developed over a series of weekly supper meetings during which the course project was reflected on, and images made by the students were selected, analysed, debated and written about, sometimes by individual members of the group and sometimes in pairs. In shaping the research into this essay, an effort was made to retain the variety of voices. KEY WORDS

African photography • colonial photography • identity • Johannesburg students • multimodal teaching practice • stereotyping • visual representation

This visual essay presents and reflects on a corpus of photographs produced by third-year History of Art students at Wits University in Johannesburg, during 2008. Steeped in a course on early colonial photographs of Africans, African uses of photography in traditional rituals and ceremonies and contemporary African studio photography practices, students were challenged to work in groups and to produce a series of photographic images showing how they see themselves as Africans and to reflect on some of the issues raised in so doing. SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC): http://vcj.sagepub.com) Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav/ Vol 9(1): 51–65 DOI 10.1177/1470357209352951

Situated within the rich scholarship of archivists, art historians and anthropologists, such as Elizabeth Edwards (1992, 2001, Christraud Geary (1991) and Virginia-Lee Webb (1992), who examine the distance and stereotyping at the heart of early imaging of Africans, this project – rooted as it is in multimodal teaching practice – enabled a deep engagement with, and critique of, processes of representation and the historical archive. Students confronted the racial, socio-cultural and historical complexities of living in Johannesburg. They explored visual strategies that exposed and questioned embedded power structures and received stereotypes; they pushed at the edges of representation; they looked again at surface meanings; they pictured realities into which they did and did not fit, and they came to reflect on the limitations of irony as a singular mode of visual response. The students produced fascinating photographs that they had made as a means of understanding-through-doing, grappling as they did with issues of representation and African identity. The images selected can each be seen as ‘gestures of defamiliarization’ (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2008: 26), whose analysis presents a complex and nuanced engagement with identity and the layered realities that comprise the contemporary South African context. The project’s images address defamiliarization in two ways: firstly, they reframe stereotypical representations of Africa and Africans by portraying dynamic, complex and layered social identities and urban landscapes. Secondly, they demonstrate how these very same complex identities and landscapes inevitably become familiar and mundane – and are therefore often overlooked as sites for potential critical enquiry. In exploring these sites, the common becomes unique, the disregarded becomes relevant, and the familiar again becomes defamiliarized. In defamiliarizing the urban landscape, Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys (2006) constructs a Johannesburg which is simultaneously banal and profound, burdened and privileged: Any iron cover you passed in the street might conceal someone’s personal effects. There was a maze of mysterious spaces underfoot, known only to those who could see it. And this special knowledge turned them into the privileged ones, made them party to something in which we, who lived in houses with wardrobes and chests of drawers, and ate three square meals a day, could not participate. Blind and numb, we passed over these secret places, did not even sense them beneath the soles of our shoes. How much more might we be missing? (p. 50)

Replete with these ‘mysterious spaces’, Johannesburg is a heteroglossia, a place of multiple tongues and realities, layered by both legitimated and subjugated histories. Zulu Girls Gossiping, 2008 (Figure 1) was a surreptitiously taken photograph of the students’ lecturer eating lunch with her friend on the Wits campus. Whilst the friends may be gossiping, they are certainly not Zulu. This

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is an ironic take on the historical tendency to racially and ethnically classify others. By appropriating the caption from an early colonial image of Africans, we draw attention to the arbitrary nature of the captions given to colonial images. But we also draw attention to the power embedded in this practice, and noted by Berger (2002) that ‘as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty, even dogmatic assertion’ (p. 50); that is to say that, despite what this may look like, they are Zulu girls and they are gossiping. This is the authority of the text. The caption in the Wallace-Bradley photograph (Figure 2) indicates the colonial attempt to describe the Zulu girls in idiomatic terms – yet the image does not indicate a light-hearted sense of gossip. Instead it points to the attempted subjugation of bodies and selves within a colonial imaginary (Mustafa, 2002: 173). African reality is invented and altered, revealing the constructed nature of early missionary photography, and the Africa it constructed. This invented reality is, to use Sydney Kasfir’s (1999) term, an ‘Africa of the mind’ (p. 94). To snap someone is to take something away, to appropriate, to leave the subject disempowered, without agency (Sontag, 1973: 4), and this is clear in the Wallace-Bradley photograph, in the subjects’ expressions and uneasy rigid postures. Yet Mirzoeff (1999) suggests that withholding consent and refusing to strike a pose, or smile, is also a deeply agentive act of resistance (p. 141). The missionary project of delivering education – secular and religious – recalls Walter Benjamin’s famous comment that ‘every act of civilisation is also an act of barbarism’ (Benjamin, 1968[1936]: 256). Our own ironic photograph, Zulu girls gossiping, 2008, must in turn be assessed in terms of Benjamin’s notion that every record or archive is both valuable and problematic. Whilst our strategy in this photograph might be valuable in highlighting the dubious colonial practice and its impulse to classify man into types (Said, 1978: 123), it also foregrounds our own complicity to some extent in this photographic practice of appropriation, unavoidably participating in the very activity that is being denounced, precisely in order to denounce it (Owens, 1980: 79). The voyeuristic, secret image Zulu girls gossiping, Johannesburg, 2008 (Figure 1) includes in the foreground part of a large public sculpture by the Italian South African, Edoardo Villa. Both his hybrid nationality and his name serve as an amusing pun on the next image (Figure 3), ‘Toulouse’, the name given to an urban complex of ‘villas’ designed in an imagined style of European architecture, no doubt also colluding with the values and aspirations of their owners. This architectural style for gated communities – many of them quickly erected on a massive scale, and strikingly unindividuated – is prevalent in Johannesburg and, for the most part, its irony goes unnoticed. In the same way that colonial missionary photographs can have almost arbitrary image–text connections, here, names and places suffer the same rupture.

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Figure 1 Zulu girls gossiping, 2008. © Photograph by Molemo Moiloa, Johannesburg, 2008.

South Africa’s architectural heritage has largely been informed by its European, or Western, connections, rather than African ones and, as Nuttall and Mbembe (2008) note: ‘Until very recently, Johannesburg described itself as the largest and most modern European city in Africa’ (p. 18). In many instances, as in ‘Toulouse’, a surface veneer perpetuates this sense of a constructed European identity, which is in fact all surface, yet reveals a deeper aspiration to identify with what is seen as the pinnacle of culture. This is for some perhaps superficially reassuring. As Mbembe (2008) suggests: ‘it is an architecture that aims to return to the “archaic” as a way of freezing rapid changes in the temporal and political structures of the surrounding world’ (p. 62). The archetypal European villa connotes an indistinct history of imperial grandeur. Villas were built for the ruling class in the countryside, but with relatively close proximity to major urban centres. In present-day South Africa, the individual module of the townhouse complex pretends to be a villa with its associations of wealth, power, spaciousness, leisure and, tellingly, a pastoral connection with the earth. What we see in the photograph is not, in fact, a villa but a cramped suburban townhouse complex, with a pastoral fantasy implied by the titling of such compounds with names that conjure rolling vineyards and hilltop vistas. The aesthetics of the built environment obfuscate the politics. In the spirit of the ‘New South Africa’ and a move toward cultural plasticity, Toulouse, a city in the south of France, is conflated with supposedly Tuscan architecture in the heart of a modern African metropole. These residences are, like their early predecessors, walled, guarded and protected by constant surveillance, from a more contemporary, urban, crime-ridden reality. 54


Figure 2 Zulu girls gossiping (J. Wallace-Bradley, Durban, c. 1890s). © Photograph: Metropolitan.

‘Johannesburg’, writes Vladislavic (2006), ‘is a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries. Territory must be secured and defended or it will be lost’ (p. 185). And in an earlier novel, The Exploded View (Vladislavic, 2004), the central protagonist, Budlender, arrives at one of these urban townhouse complexes and muses on its fortress-like security: Repelled at the ramparts. ‘Villa Toscana’ was printed on a salmon-coloured wall to the left. Below each wrought iron letter was a streak of rust like dried blood, as if a host of housebreakers had impaled themselves on the name. Would the defenders of this city-state pour down boiling oil if he ventured too close? (p. 9)

Budlender also considers the prevalence of veneer and the complex surfaces of Johannesburg: The tones and textures were passable … But the scales were all wrong. Things were either too big or too small. In the door of the guardhouse was a keyhole so enormous he could have put his fist through


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Figure 3 Toulouse/Johannesburg. © Photograph by Alex Horsler, Johannesburg, 2008.

it, and just below it the brass disc of a conventional and presumably functional Yale lock. (pp. 9–10)

Much of the suburban architecture of Johannesburg attests to a ‘dramatic geographical and temporal arbitrariness’ (Mbembe, 2008: 60), producing ‘an experience of fragmentation and of permutations that may never achieve coherence’ (p. 63). Dinnertime at a kraal, 2008 (Figure 4) presents a self-conscious statement of modernity, civility and cosmopolitanism. Its subject – cell phones and pre-packed take-away lunch – does not easily cohere with its title. The original image, to which this photograph refers, is of a Zulu family around a pot preparing to eat (Figure 5). It is clearly a staged image, a photoshoot, with the subjects arranged around the central pot of food, posing, and with a title steeped in ethnographic practices. It is a static image reminiscent of dioramas in natural history museums. The original image is a tableau presenting a particular view of Africa and Africans. The 2008 image (Figure 4) deliberately unsettles this stereotypical view so repeatedly presented to the world. It also presents a staged tableau. This time, however, it is focused on affluence and consumerism as an indication of an African culture that is global, and hybrid – does East meet West (in Africa) in tikka chicken pasta salad? – with

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the same complex incoherence of ‘Toulouse’. Both images assert a contemporary and perhaps more accurate view of Johannesburg as fractured, layered, perplexed and a terrifying mix of fantasies, desires and realities. Though the tikka chicken pasta salad may be hermetically sealed, packaging a branded and standardized meal, the photograph offers a view of Africa that is anything but. It is a counter-act, or remedy even, to previously conceived views of Africa. Announce the good news, 2008, is the title given to Figure 6, cropped to focus on the sun’s rays shining behind the last syllable of the word ‘Lotto’ – the South African National Lottery. The title is cynically borrowed from an early missionary photograph taken in the Belgian Congo in 1920, CONGO – Announce the good news, an image of progress towards Christianity, the spreading of God’s word, and the values of decency and civilization. The Lotto photograph was inspired by Patrick Brantlinger’s (1985) poignant comment: ‘Africa grew “dark” as Victorian explorers, missionaries and scientists flooded it with light’ (p. 166), a statement implying that ‘showing the light’ required a darkening, or primitivizing, of their new African subjects – a civilizing act that was, in the Benjaminian sense, dangerous indeed. What is good news to some may not be good news to others – in similar ways to colonial times, the good news is constructed and served up to a disenfranchised group, whether economically or politically. In both of the historic images Congo – Announce the Good News and Nouvelle Anvers – La Mission. La Classe (Figure 7), the pedagogic role of the church is emphasized and, by extension, aligned to colonial ideology. In Figure 9, the classroom depicted resembles a cruciform church. The central walkway becomes its nave, the teacher’s desk an altar. The crucifix in the window on the right side of the photograph echoes the crucifix hung from the wall in the centre of the classroom. A sense of symmetry, rigidity, ideology and control emanate from the picture. This order, control, indoctrination and domination evident in the Congo classroom played itself out again, and differently, in South Africa when apartheid education replaced the missionary education. Both systems largely disregarded the linguistic, cultural and religious differences among pupils, denying their cultures, their values and hence holding their minds captive (Ngu~ gı~ wa Thiong’o, 1993: 31). The top-down delivery of knowledge, the kind of education embodied by the Nouvelle Anvers mission school classroom is precisely the ‘dangerous civilizing act’ that Benjamin spoke of. It is a mode of teaching that removes individual or cultural agency, removes imagination which is, in Appadurai’s (1996) words, ‘a social practice central to all forms of agency ... [a] key component of the new global order’ (p. 31). In South Africa in the mid 1970s, the white government decided that half of all high school subjects in black schools must be taught in Afrikaans, the language of oppression, and a language in which many black teachers and learners were not proficient. Its dire consequences for the quality of


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Figure 4 Dinnertime at a kraal, men first, women after, 2008. © Photograph by Kate Roper, Johannesburg, 2008.

education that most students then received resulted in a massive student-led protest on 16 June 1976. Police opened fire on the marching students, and photographer Sam Nzima captured the pietà-like image of Hector Petersen’s body, one of the first victims of this educational struggle (Figure 8). The images in Figures 7 and 9, religious in different ways, illustrate the dangerous

Figure 5 Dinnertime at a kraal, men first, women after (George T. Ferneyhough, 1880s).

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Figure 6 Announce the good news, 2008. © Photography Melissa Nom Chong, Johannesburg, 2008.

power of political, pedagogical and linguistic domination, and the complexities embedded in transformation. In post-apartheid South Africa, the political and social potentialities of language are no different. Towards the middle of 2008, all the roads and pavements in the Johannesburg suburb of Melville were repainted by the city

Figure 7 Congo – ‘Annoncez la Bonne Nouvelle.’ [Congo– ‘Announcing the Good News’]. c. 1920, postcard, collotype. Published by Les Franciscaines Missionnaires De Marie En Mission, Belgian Congo. EEPA Postcard Collection CG 39-5. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced with permission.


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Figure 8 Hector Petersen © Photograph Sam Nzima, 1976. Reproduced with permission.

municipality. Interestingly, however, only English names and references were touched up. The Afrikaans language was left to quietly dissolve as an act of erasure from public memory; a deliberate monument to neglect. ‘School/Stadig/Skool’ (Figure 10) subtly raises questions about the pace of social transformation – signalled by the fading word ‘STADIG’ (SLOW). It is crucial to note that the word ‘SCHOOL’ which has been selectively re-written and re-emphasized is in English – ironically, the archetypal colonial language. Being both post-colonial and post-apartheid, Johannesburg is a complex, layered, inconsistent city. These often satirical, paradoxical, violent and playful intersections are replete, above and below the surface of common discourse and interaction. They are written into the streets, and into the recesses of every neighbourhood. They are at once available and hidden, on and absorbed into, the surface. Intersections and interactions between people in this bristling postcolonial, post-apartheid city are captured in the strange intimacy, or intimate strangeness of Stacey Vorster’s photograph, This is Peacock: father, husband, friend (Figure 11). The same scrutiny employed in the colonial project of documenting and categorizing race and otherness is here used to indicate intimacy. This is an image made using the tools and strategies of another, distancing, register, not in order to stereotype (as in Herbert Lang’s line up of pygmies in Figure 12) but to construct an image that is more intimate, more about knowing than about remoteness. This portrait is of a named and known individual, it is Peacock, and he is a father, husband and friend. There is an implied loving relationship between this white photographer and her black model yet the image is 60


Figure 9 ‘Nouvelle Anvers – La mission. La classe.’ [Class at a mission school in Nouvelle Anvers on the Congo River, halfway between Coquilhatville and Lisala, Belgian Congo]. Photographer unknown, c. 1910, postcard, collotype. Sponsored by the Scheutist Missionaries. Publisher unknown, c. 1912. EEPA Postcard Collection CG 40-28. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

disconcerting; it registers an uncompromising scrutiny that is mutual – he looks back at her with the same intent with which she attempts to capture him, and its strength lies in Vorster’s attempt to inhabit a fractured reality. The image simultaneously sits uncomfortably between intimacy and something else, something unsettling. Its harsh light and blunt shadows, the head-on direct gaze, intense eyes and furrowed brow create an unease, perhaps because its scrutiny and close-up also recall early colonial pseudoscientific documentation of the Other. The ‘scientific’ othering of Africans based on physical appearance and difference was a major cog in the colonial metaphor-machine. It has had a long lasting effect on relations between black and white people in South Africa. Nuttall probes this in her recent book, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (2009) when she asks: Can one write oneself in to Johannesburg, a city one feels to be receding from one’s grasp, unless one inhabits at least the beginnings of a cross-racial world, a world of peers and associates and friends to whom one actually speaks?’ (p. 93)


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Figure 10 School/Stadig/Skool. © Photograph by Tim Zeelie, Johannesburg, 2008.

Whilst it may be a reflex of current critical practice to produce images that are cynical, satirical and ironical, images in these ironic modes potentially fall prey to the same destructive impact of the practices which they pick apart. What this type of practice overlooks is space for a constructive re-imagining of a shifting landscape of relations and interactions, for a sincere and unarmoured rethinking, of which Peacock, is a moving example. The contemporary images pictured in this visual essay were produced by students living in a city marked explicitly and implicitly by its brutal past. Simultaneously immersed in the study of African photography and its legacies, their images engage with the constructedness and highly charged nature of identity and of looking and being looked at. As such, they place themselves deeply within this murky field of representation and encounter first hand – as opposed to at arm’s length – the difficulties, the challenges and the pleasures of seeing themselves connected into a broader social reality with a self-reflexivity and a criticality captured in their images and in the combination of images presented in this visual essay.

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Figure 11 This is Peacock: father, husband, friend. © Photograph by Stacey Vorster, Johannesburg, 2008. Figure 12 Herbert Lang, Four portraits of Pygmies produced between 1909 and 1915 – part of Lang’s attempt to create ‘what he perceived as a scientifically valid series of anthropological portraits’ (Schildkrout, 1991: 70).

REFERENCES

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, W. (1968[1936]) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and with introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Berger, J. (2002) ‘The Ambiguity of the Photograph’, in K.M. Askew and R. Wilk (eds) The Anthropology of Media. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Brantlinger, P. (1985) ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent’, Critical Inquiry XII: 166–203. Edwards, E. (ed.) (1992) Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. Edwards, E. (2001) Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg. Geary, C. (1991) ‘Missionary Photography: Private and Public Readings’, African Arts 24(4), special issue, Historical Photographs of Africa, October: 48–100. James, R. (1997) Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kasfir, S. (1999) ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, in O. Oguibe, and O. Enwezor (eds) Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, pp. 88–113. London: Institute of International Visual Arts. Mirzoeff, N. (1999) An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Mustafa, H.N. (2002) ‘Portraits of Modernity: Fashioning Selves in Dakarois Popular Photography’, in P. Landau and D. Kaspin (eds) Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, A. (2008) ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’, in S. Nuttall and A. Mbembe (eds) Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, pp. 37–67. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


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Ngu~ gı~; wa Thiong’o (1993) Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Oxford: James Currey Heinemann. Nuttall, S. (2009) Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on PostApartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Nuttall, S. and Mbembe, A. (eds) (2008) Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Owens, C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2’, October 13, Summer: 58–80. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schildkroud, E. (1991) ‘The Spectacle of Africa through the Lens of Herbert Lang: Belgian Congo Photographs 1909–1915’, African Arts 24(1), Special Issue, Historical Photographs of Africa, October: 70–100. Sontag, S. (1973) On Photography. New York: Picador. Vladislavic, I. (2004) The Exploded View. Johannesburg: Random House. Vladislavic, I. (2006) Portrait with Keys: Joburg & What-What. Johannesburg: Umuzi. Webb, V.L. (1992) ‘Fact and Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Zulu’, African Arts 25(1), January: 50–99. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

JONI BRENNER is a practising artist and lecturer in History of Art at the Wits School of Arts, Wits University, Johannesburg. A member of the Wits Multiliteracies Group, she has published articles emerging from the pedagogies developed in the Visual Literacy Foundation Course. Much of this work has been presented at international conferences including the LERN Conferences in Spetses, Greece (2001), Beijing (2002), London (2003) and Johannesburg (2007). She was awarded the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand ViceChancellor’s Individual Teaching Award in 2008. Interested in promoting and encouraging student development, she initiated and led this project, working closely with five of her students. Address: Division of Visual Arts, Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, WITS 2050, South Africa. [email: joni.brenner@ wits.ac.za] ALEXANDER HORSLER is completing his Honours degree in Fine Arts with a research interest in the built environment. MOLEMO MOILOA is a fourth-year Fine Art student also majoring in Anthropology at Wits University. PAULA MUNSIE is an Honours student at Wits University, majoring in History of Art with a special focus on African heritage and post-colonial practices of art and architecture. STACEY VORSTER is a Fine Arts student at Wits University.

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TIM ZEELIE is reading for an Honours degree in History of Art and English Literature at Wits University. He is also the media co-ordinator at the Market Photo Workshop, a school of photography based in Newtown, Johannesburg. Alexander Horsler, Molemo Moiloa, Paula Munsie, Stacey Vorster and Tim Zeelie can all be contacted via Joni Brenner at the above email or University of Witwatersrand address.


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