From salons to the native reserve: reformulating the “native question” through pictorial photography in 1950s South Africa

The article provides a critical reflection on the practice of photographic salon exhibitions in the 1950s. In South Africa and abroad, there was a resurgence of photographic societies from the early 1950s that encouraged amateur photographers to create images based on a distinct visual grammar, thereby offering them not only an opportunity to display their work but to compete amongst each other. Subsequently, salon exhibitions produced work that would be judged on its pictorial rather than strict representational value thereby depoliticising the exhibition space. On the other hand, this article seeks to place this practice in the realm of racial segregation under apartheid by considering the deployment of the “black subject” in the native rural reserve in Joseph Denfield’s (1911–1967) work. Through a study of his ethnographic photographs which were exhibited internationally in this period as pictorial work, as well as his intellectualisation of his practice as native photography, it argues that the space of the salon allowed him to pose the “native question” pictorially, that is, provided a discourse through which the “native” could be “known” and ordered.     

Hearing voices in the archive

This essay is an attempt to fathom the performative and textual potential of historical sound recordings from the Lautarchiv in Berlin, along the available written files and a particular set of acoustic files spoken by an isiXhosa speaker. Read and listened to together, these files document the event and rationale of the recordings of the Phonographische Kommission with a man from the Eastern Cape, who was recorded while being interned as a foreign subject, in a German camp for British civilians in World War I. Following the acousmatic voice that speaks on several recordings, the essay explores the position of the speaker and the enunciation that speaks of the experience of war and displacement, and the complexities of audible traces of imperial knowledge production.