The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

esistance history sought to provide a detailed understanding of ‘what happened’ in the
framework of chronological narrative, adding in incremental fashion to our store of
information on resistance. This realist mode was most apparent, however, in the ways in
which different resistance histories drew on photographs to show how things ‘really were’
and to give ‘real faces’ to their resistance subjects. Virtually all of them, from the
documentary histories of the Karis and Carter school, to the social historians associated
with the History Workshop and the ODP at the University of the Witwatersrand treated
photographs as ‘universal truth tellers’. The dominant perception of photographs was that
they had inherent qualities of objectivity and empirical accuracy, and that they reflected
reality in a neutral way. 179
Almost no attempt was made in South African resistance histories to understand different
genres of photography from missionary, and ethnographic, to portrait, both public and
private, and the histories and sociologies of these photographic modes. Moreover,
nowhere in South African resistance literature was there any engagement with issues of
meaning and representation in photographic images: what meanings and imaginaries
were intended through image‐making, what pictures ‘want’, what audiences were
intended, and how these meanings, desires and audiences changed over time. 180
179 A vast and growing literature has addressed and challenged these perceptions. For a selection, see
Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973; John Berger, ‘Appearances’,
in John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling, New York: Pantheon Press, 1982; W.J.T. Mitchell,
‘What Do Pictures Really Want?’, October, No 77, Summer 1996; Arjun Appadurai, `The Colonial
Backdrop’, Afterimage, March/April 1997; Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester and Wolfram Hartmann,
‘Photography, History and Memory’, in Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes
(eds), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: UCT Press,
1998); Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photography and the Performance of History’, Kronos, No 27, November
2001.
180 For a discussion of the circuits of distribution and different uses of photographs and resultant
changes in meaning in South Africa, see Ciraj Rassool and Patricia Hayes, ‘Science and the Spectacle:
/Khanako’s South Africa, 1936‐7’ Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds), Deep
Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); see also See Tina Smith and Ciraj
Rassool, ‘History in Photographs at the District Six Museum’ and Patricia Hayes and Andrew Bank,
‘Introduction’, Kronos, No 27, November 2001. For a discussion of meaning in South African
photographs, see Santu Mofokeng ‘The Black Photo Album/Look At Me, 1890‐1900s’, Nka: Journal of
Contemporary African Art, No 4, Spring 1996.
170