Research Articles (History)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/500

Browse

Browsing by Author "Hayes, Patricia"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The blur of history: Student protest and photographic clarity in South African universities, 2015�2016
    (University of the Western Cape, 2017) Hayes, Patricia
    I have three points I would like to put forward � about strong photographs, about clarity and about blur. I also have a number of photographs dating from October 2015 at the University of the Western Cape that will be planted through the text as the argument unfolds.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The political sublime: reading Kok Nam, Mozambican photographer (1939-2012)
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Assubuji, Rui; Hayes, Patricia
    Kok Nam began his photographic career at Studio Focus in Louren�o Marques in the 1950s, graduated to the newspaper Not�cias and joined Tempo magazine in the early 1970s. Most recently he worked at the journal Savana as a photojournalist and later director. This article opens with an account of the relationship that developed between Kok Nam and the late President Samora Machel, starting with the photo-grapher�s portrait of Machel in Nachingwea in November 1974 before Independence. It traces an arc through the Popular Republic (1976-1990) from political revelation at its inception to the difficult years of civil war and Machel�s death in the plane crash at Mbuzini in 1986. The article then engages in a series of photo-commentaries across a selection of Kok Nam�s photographs, several published in their time but others selected retrospectively by Kok Nam for later exhibition and circulation. The approach taken is that of �association�, exploring the connections between the photographs, their histories both then and in the intervening years and other artifacts and mediums of cultural expression that deal with similar issues or signifiers picked up in the images. Among the signifiers picked up in the article are soldiers, pigs, feet, empty villages, washing, doves and bridges. The central argument is that Kok Nam participated with many others in a kind of collective hallucination during the Popular Republic, caught up in the �political sublime�. Later Kok Nam shows many signs of a photographic �second thinking� that sought out a more delicate sublime in his own archive.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Santu Mofokeng, photographs: 'the violence is in the knowing'
    (Wiley - Blackwell Publishing, 2009) Hayes, Patricia
    Born in 1956, Santu Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective that engaged in expos� and documentary photography of anti-apartheid resistance and social conditions during the 1980s in South Africa. However, Mofokeng was an increasingly important internal critic of mainstream photojournalism, and of the ways black South Africans were represented in the bigger international picture economy during the political struggle. Eschewing scenes of violence and the third-party view of white-on-black brutality in particular, he began his profound explorations of the everyday and spiritual dimensions of African life, both in the city and in the countryside. His formal techniques favor �fictions� that contain smoke, mist, and other matters and techniques that occlude rather than expose. Using angularity and ambivalence, he also ruptures realist expectations and allows space for the uncanny and the supernatural. He works with the notion of seriti (a northern seSotho term encompassing aura, shadow, power, essence, and many other things). The essay follows strands in Mofokeng�s writings and statements in relation to certain of his photographs, most recently repositioned in the substantial 2007 exhibition Invoice, to argue that he has pushed for a desecularization and Africanization of photography from the 1980s to the present. In more recent work the scourge of apartheid has been replaced by the HIV/AIDS virus, a mutation of nature, exacerbating the spiritual insecurities of many people in postapartheid South Africa. The essay concludes that Mofokeng�s work poses a critique of the parallel paradigms of Marxist-influenced social history and documentary photography in 1980s South Africa, both still highly influential, by attempting to reinsert aura (seriti) into photography and by highlighting what secular Marxism has concealed and proscribed.