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.

Acknowledgements

This essay has been adapted from part of my PhD dissertation. I want to thank my supervisor, Jennifer Bajorek, for her constructive reading and suggestions while I was writing the dissertation. I am also indebted to Marijke Boucherie and Astrid Schmetterling, for their insights on Emanuel Levinas’ ethical philosophy. I am especially grateful to Jillian Edelstein for her time and for giving me permission to reproduce two of her photographs in this article. My thanks to Liz Wells and David Bate for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 I draw on Carol Zemel's definition for icons, namely, “familiar pictures that emblematically compress or condense the data of events” (203), in other words, “photographs [whose] enduring force [casts them] as emblems that enable memory of the past” (201), to invoke Sam Nzima's photograph of Hector Pieterson, which was first published in The World (on 16 July 1976) but has since then become a photographic icon of the 1976 student protest.

2 Pumla Godobo-Madikizela, a clinical psychologist who served on the Human Rights Violations Committee, argues that “Unlike in a court of law, where victims are brought into the picture only in relation to the perpetrator's deed, the TRC put victims in the center of the process, allowing them to tell their stories in the way that they chose before a listening audience” (11).

3 Njabulo Ndebele stresses that the TRC “has given legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices [and] lifted the veil of secrecy and state-induced blindness” (20).

4 The narrative structure in Truth and Lies comprises double-paged spreads in which text and image complement each other. Landscapes and townscapes (which contextualise both the TRC proceedings and some of the stories that emerged in and around the hearings) are intermeshed with portraits of victims and perpetrators.

5 Azoulay defines it as a space that is open to “Anyone who addresses others through photographs … even if she is a stateless person who has lost her ‘right to have rights’” (85). That space is configured by what Azoulay calls “the civil contract of photography”, a convention that “regulates the various uses of photography and its relations to exchange” (26).

6 In Truth and Lies, Edelstein's portraits make a conscious use of decontextualising backgrounds. The stripped-down and minimal essentialism of the portraits draw the viewer's attention to what the subjects are trying to convey. Portraitees face the camera unflinchingly, demanding reciprocity of direct, face-to-face interaction. What provides meaning in these photographs is not context, but rather the emotion in the subject's face and body. They invite the viewer to contemplate what the portraitees might be feeling at that particular moment, and engage with them on an emotional level.

7 Gideon Nieuwoudt applied for amnesty and testified before the Amnesty Committee on 25 September 1997. The transcript of Niewoudt's amnesty hearing in the case of Topsy Madaka and Siphiwo Mtimkulu may be accessed at the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission website at http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/amntrans/pe/4madaka.htm.

8 Nieuwoudt's visit to the Mtimkulu family was documented in a film, directed by Mark Kaplan, titled Where Truth Lies. The meeting between Nieuwoudt and Siphiwo's parents, alongside interviews with Joyce Mtimkulu and Gideon Niewoudt, and the reconstruction of scenes of torture based on Siphiwo Mtimkulu's affidavit, is treated in a thirty-minute-long documentary. Throughout the film Niewoudt's expression is impassive and his words contrived. The Mtimkulus’ expression is remarkable: calm, strong and dignified. They reject his apology — it is fifteen years too late.

9 Since this paper has focused on two portraits of women, it might seem that the strength and dignity in the subjects’ bearing stem from a certain trust that was established during the photographic encounter, or from an empathetic relationship between a woman photographer and the women portraitees. However, it ought to be said here that careful observation of Edelstein's photographs in Truth and Lies reveals that she gives all her subjects (whether they are men or women, victims or perpetrators) the same frame and the same kind of dignity. In a personal interview, Edelstein remarked that this approach is central to her work ethics. She adopts a non-directional stance when she is photographing. At the same time, she keeps her feelings and emotions at a distance so that she can capture something that is meaningful to the portraitee, without being threatening; that is meaningful to her, and, in the final analysis, meaningful to the person who is going to view it.