Between an Empty Camera and Bare White Feet: Racial Complexity in the Photographic Archive of Ricardo Rangel

Abstract

Amplified by a feedback loop of nationalist memorialization and international reception, the dominant narrative on Ricardo Rangel’s work reduces the anti-colonial purchase of his images to a simple disclosure of binarized injustice. By reading lesser-known images alongside his more canonical production, I argue that his wider archive in fact shows a gradated engagement with the racial complexities of late-colonial Mozambique and provides a key source of material for a post-colonial analysis of its capital, Lourenço Marques. To wit, Rangel’s images permit both a nuanced reflection on his own intermedial status and a critique of colonialism that goes beyond the sheer fact of native exploitation and marginalization.