Gestures of defamiliarization

Abstract

One of the problems with teaching African photography in an urban Johannesburg-based classroom is the tendency to teach the histories and practices of photography in Africa as if they were somehow separate from us. This separation or disjunction is partly because, as Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe point out in their book Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008): ‘until very recently, Johannesburg described itself as the largest and most modern European city in Africa’ (p. 18), and consequently South Africans very often fail to see themselves as African. The title of this visual essay — ‘gestures of defamiliarization’ — is taken from their book. To overcome this problem of separation, Joni Brenner introduced an active learning project designed to involve students directly in the thorny realm of subjectivity, identity and representation. This essay was written together with five students who participated, and excelled, in the course. It was developed over a series of weekly supper meetings during which the course project was reflected on, and images made by the students were selected, analysed, debated and written about, sometimes by individual members of the group and sometimes in pairs. In shaping the research into this essay, an effort was made to retain the variety of voices.