An alternative route for considering violence in photography

Abstract

Critical engagement with South African apartheid photography has focused pre-eminently on discourses of violence characterising an extensive photographic archive that spans the life-cycle of the oppressive apartheid regime. During the first years of democracy in South Africa, discussions about post-apartheid photography considered the approach and choice of subject matter of photographers whose work centred on the country's promising post-apartheid cultural and socio-political landscape. However, as the elation surrounding the first democratic elections in 1994 started to wane, socially engaged photographers chose to expose the multiple forms of violence that permeate every aspect of life in contemporary South Africa, spawning scholars’ interest in dialectics of continuation and change in post-apartheid photography. This paper seeks a different line of inquiry. It therefore singles out a photographic project by Jillian Edelstein that encourages a different modality of thinking about the representation of violence not commonly adopted in reflections on South African photography. Emmanuel Levinas’ insights (articulated here with those of Ariella Azoulay) offer a framework for examining Edelstein's work as an ethical–political locus sustained by ethical and civil relationships between photographer, photographed subject and viewer. This critical approach opens up an important space for considering an ethics of looking that enlarges the horizon of response, demanding accountability and commitment, while correlatively discouraging civic apathy or passivity.