How to see the South African black people in Santu Mofokeng’s image-text archive?

Abstract

South African artist Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997) displays black people’s photographic portraits and text through a slide projection. For this archive project, he collected, restored, and re-contextualized the old portraits and added text. The presented figures depict the black South Africans who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them are well-dressed and take a pose in a European studio. Different from the well-prepared photographic representation, pieces of text include a disorder of alphabets, varied size of letters, inconsistent ground color, and misprinting effect. In a sense, the ambivalent mode of images and text seems to appeal the black people’s inner conflicts between being modernized versus colonized. In fact, Mofokeng once said that such a middle-class of black people did not exist in his education. Thus, this research analyzes the ways in which intertextuality of images and text in The Black Photo Album fills with the incomplete part of South African history. Reconsidering the functional limits of the TRC(Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1995) in South Africa, this research argues that Mofokeng’s archive project delivers emotions of memories of the black people, which were not registered in the nation’s history.