Revisioning the Ethnographic Photograph

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to destabilise the ethnographic photographic genre through an exploration of some of the photographs contained in the Pauline Ingle Photographic Evaluation and Realisation (PIPER) project. By locating the collection alongside contemporary recuperative attempts to refigure the archive, the paper explores both the mutability of photographic genres and the ways in which the approaches and techniques of her photography in a rural area complicate an ethnographic reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnographic genre
• recuperation
• Pauline Ingle
• rural
• documentary
• ritual
• portraiture

Notes

2 Edwards has observed that photography, with its technological superiority exerting control and categorisation over the physical world, is symbolic of the power relations inherent in the colonial situation, in which unequal relationships served to sustain a controlling knowledge that appropriated the ‘reality’ of other cultures into an ordered structure. See E. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in E. Edwards, ed., Anthropology & Photography: 1860–1920 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 3–18. Within this broad frame, there are varying permutations of photography, but illustrative examples from Ingle’s period include J. Broster, The Thembu, Their Beadwork, Songs and Dances (Cape Town: Purnell, 1976) and A. Elliot, The Magic World of the Xhosa (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1970). In imaging the Transkei – and, in Elliott’s case, the ‘Xhosa’ – these publications seem to unquestioningly adhere to (and celebrate) the kinds of notions of ethnicity that imply discrete groupings with objectively discernible cultural differences. This conceptualisation unproblematically embraces the idea of ‘the tribe’, replete with specific markers of language and identity, that retains an enduring and unchanging nature.

3 Although she was not an anthropologist undertaking an ethnography, her photographs were more akin to the photographs of Isaac Schapera in ‘old Botswana’ in that they seem to share an interest in the quotidian and an ‘aesthetics of the ordinary’. See J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff, ‘Portraits by the Ethnographer as a Young Man: The Photography of Isaac Schapera in “Old Botswana”’, Anthropology Today, 22,1 (2006), 9–16.

4 The Piper Collection, Images of Transkei ImiFanekiso ya Pesha kweNciba 1949–1976. (Pretoria: Mindspike Designs, 2003), 3–18.

5 Dr R. Ingle in discussion with the author, November 2012.

6 J. Parsons, ‘The Politics of Representation and Communication in the Exhibition Images of Transkei: ImiFanekiso yaPesha kweNciba 1949–1976’ (MA thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2005).

7 Parsons, ‘Politics of Representation’, 17–20.

8 Parsons, ‘Politics of Representation’, 16.

9 C. Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 112; Parsons, ‘Politics of Representation’, 12.

10 Parsons, ‘Politics of Representation’, 45.

11 Parsons, ‘Politics of Representation’, 20.

12 Parsons, ‘Politics of Representation’, 45, 77.

13 A. Bank, ‘Anthropology and Portrait Photography: Gustav Fritsch’s ‘Natives of South Africa’, 1863–1872’, in Patricia Hayes and Andrew Bank, eds, Special Issue: Visual History, Kronos, 27 (2001), 43–76.

14 M.D. Stevenson and M. Graham-Stewart, Surviving the Lens: Photographic Studies of South and East African People 1870–1920 (Vlaeberg: Fernwood Press, 2001), 21.

15 Stevenson and Graham-Stewart, Surviving the Lens, 21.

16 J. Faris, ‘Navajo and Photography’, in C. Pinney and N. Peterson, eds, Photography’s Other Histories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 85–99.

17 Faris, ‘Navajo and Photography’, 87.

18 Faris, ‘Navajo and Photography’, 87.

19 J. Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2005).

20 Lydon, Eye Contact, 224.

21 Lydon, Eye Contact, 225.

22 A. Putter, ‘Native Work: An Artwork by Andrew Putter Consisting of 38 Portrait Photographs’, in D. Wylie and A. Bank, eds, Special Issue: Documentary Photography in South Africa, Kronos, 38 (November 2012), 249–262.

23 M. Godby, ‘Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's Photographs for “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa” (1928–1954): The Construction of an Ambiguous Idyll’, Kronos, 36 (2010), 54–83.

24 Putter, ‘Native Work’, 250.

25 Putter, ‘Native Work’, 250.

26 Putter, ‘Native Work’, 253.

27 P. Davison and G. Mahashe, ‘Visualizing the Realm of a Rain-Queen: The Production and Circulation of Eileen and Jack Krige’s Lobedu Fieldwork Photographs from the 1930s’, in D. Wylie and A. Bank, eds, Special Issue: Documentary Photography in South Africa, Kronos, 38 (November 2012), 77.

28 E. Edwards, ‘Photography in Ethnographic Museums: A Reflection’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 7 (1995), 136, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40793570.

29 Davison and Mahashe, ‘Visualizing the Realm of a Rain-Queen’, 80.

30 Davison and Mahashe, ‘Visualizing the Realm of a Rain-Queen’, 81.

31 Fletcher, Kanitra. “Re-covered: Wangechi Mutu, Kenyatta AC Hinkle, and the postcolonial potentiality of black women in colonial (ist) photographs.” Social Dynamics 40, no. 1 (2014): 181–198.

32 Fletcher, ‘Re-covered’, 193.

33 Fletcher, ‘Re-covered’, 181.

34 I am using a loose definition of the documentary genre here to refer to its apparent evidentiary or indexical characteristics. But see later in the essay, where I refer to its political instrumentality as formulated by Solomon-Godeau and as applied to the Piper Collection.

35 Bank, ‘Anthropology and Portrait Photography’, 45.

36 Davison and Mahashe, ‘Visualizing the Realm of a Rain-Queen’, 65.

37 A. Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 178.

38 Godby, ‘Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's Photographs’.

39 D. Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2009).

40 See B. Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa 1900–1983 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991).

41 Godby, ‘Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's Photographs’.

42 Stevenson and Graham-Stewart, Surviving the Lens.

43 Appadurai, Arjun. “The Colonial Backdrop-Photography.” Afterimage (March-April 1997), 4-9.

44 Appadurai, ‘Colonial Backdrop’.

45 C. Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography & Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 46–74.

46 Godby, ‘Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin's Photographs’, 71.

47 C. Lutz and J. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 106.

48 Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, 173.

49 Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, 178.

50 Dr R. Ingle, in discussion with the author, November 2012.

51 Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, 179.

52 M. Gullestadt, Picturing Pity: Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication. Image and Word in a North Cameroon Mission (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2007).

53 Gullestadt, Picturing Pity, 12.

54 Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, 91.

55 Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, 91.

56 B. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, S. Barker, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 13.

57 See P. Crogan, ‘Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy, Technics, and Activism’, Cultural Politics, 6, 2 (2010), 133–156, doi.org/10.2752/175174310X12672016.548162. In Stiegler’s terms, tertiary retentions are the externalised forms of objective ‘memory’ made possible through a range of hypomenata – ‘cinematogram, photogram, phonogram, writing, painting, sculpture, but also monuments and objects generally, inasmuch as they testify to me about a past that I have not necessarily lived myself’. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 28. Crogan, ‘Bernard Stiegler’, 143, further highlights how ‘ … the phonograph and then the cinematograph, as the sum of photography and phonography, represent decisive shifts in the tertiary “substrate” of consciousness in the industrial epoch’.

58 G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2001), 23.

59 J. Broster, Red Blanket Valley (Johannesburg: H. Keartland, 1967).

60 J. Broster, African Elegance (Cape Town: New York Purnell, 1973).

61 E.D. Ermath, ‘Beyond “The Subject”: Individuality in the Discursive Condition’, New Literary History, 31 (2000): 405–419.

62 E. Ermath, ‘Beyond the “Subject”’, in Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, eds, The Nature of History Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 281.

63 Ermath, ‘Beyond “The Subject”’, New Literary History, 411, where palimpsestousness refers to ‘the multiplied discursive condition in which each moment involves a complex subjective specification of multiple codes’.

64 See B. Bevernage, ‘Tales of Pastness and Contemporaneity: On the Politics of Time in History and Anthropology’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 20, 3 (2016), 352–374, doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2016.1192257.

65 J. Fabian, ‘The Other Revisited: Critical Afterthoughts’, Anthropological Theory, 6, 2 (2006), 139–152.

66 M. Bratu Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry, 34, 2 (2008), 340. Jstor.org/stable.1086/529060.

67 J. Faris, ‘Navajo and Photography’, in C. Pinney and N. Peterson, eds, Photography’s Other Histories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 86.

68 Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, 338.

69 Pauline Ingle took up photography as a child, after a bout of measles left her severely deaf.

70 Z. Ngwane, ‘"Christmas Time” and the Struggles for the Household in the Countryside: Rethinking the Cultural Geography of Migrant Labour in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 3 (2003), doi:10.1080/0305707032000094974.

71 P. McAllister, ‘Are Concepts Such as “Margins” and “Marginalisation” Useful for Analysing Rural Life in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa?’ Development Southern Africa, 25, 2 (2008), 176. doi:10.1080/03768350802090550. Here McAllister references several arguments made by R. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

72 D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

73 H. Bial, ‘Ritual’, in H. Bial, ed., The Performance Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 77.

74 V. Turner, ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in H. Bial, ed., The Performance Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 79–87.

75 Edwards, Elizabeth. The camera as historian: Amateur photographers and historical imagination, 1885–1918. Duke University Press, 2012.

76 Edwards, Camera as Historian, 14.

77 Edwards, Camera as Historian, 171.

78 D. Battaglia, ‘On Practical Nostalgia: Self-Prospecting among Urban Trobrianders’, in D. Battaglia, ed., The Rhetorics of Self-Making (Berkeley, University of California Press), 77.

79 Fabian, ‘The Other Revisited’, 145.

80 C. Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), quoted in Edwards, Camera as Historian, 170.

81 P. Hayes, ‘Northern Exposures: The Photography of C.H.L. Hahn, Native Commissioner of Ovamboland 1915–1946’, in W. Hartmann, J. Silvester and P. Hayes, eds, The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998), 180. Hayes et al. point to this as the ‘perfected ethnographic photograph’, which represents the native as isolated from all European influences and is therefore devoid of signs of white presence. In this way, ‘natives’ are bestowed with culture but not history, and this is also evident in the conventions of captioning, in which captions are written in the present tense, so as to accentuate the sense of being extra-historical.

82 M. Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), 188, www.jstor.org/stable/488138.

83 Perkinson, Stephen. “Rethinking the Origins of Portraiture.” Gesta 46, no. 2 (2007): 135-157.

84 C. Freeland, ‘Portraits in Painting and Photography’, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 135, 1 (2007), 102. Here she quotes R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 65.

85 C.M. Geary, ‘The Past in the Present: Photographic Portraiture and the Evocation of Multiple Histories in the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon’, in J. Peffer and E.L. Cameron, eds, Portraiture & Photography in Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 224.

86 H. Berger, ‘Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of the Early Modern Portraiture’, Representations, 46 (1994), 94, www.jstor.org/stable/2928780. This is echoed by Berger, who posits a theory of portraiture as it pertains to painting, in which he aims to recuperate the contribution of the subject as a participant in the act of portrayal and, more generally, situated as part of the activity that produced the portrait.

87 M. Bal, ‘Light Writing: Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic Age’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 4 (2004), 7, www.jstor.org/stable/44030024

88 C.M. Keller, ‘Visual Griots: Identity, Aesthetics and the Social Roles of Portrait Photographers in Mali’, in J. Peffer and E.L. Cameron, eds, Portraiture & Photography in Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 392–394. Here I diverge slightly from Sidibé’s argument in relation to his Vue De Dos portrait series, in which through the positioning of the back of the person, the photographer and sitter are empowered with knowledge and accessibility, not available to the viewer, and he posits this as antithetical to the colonial photograph. In Ingle’s case, I am making the argument that the back views are in a sense not allowing her access to the inside knowledge and therefore positioning her on the outside, just like the viewers. In this sense, knowledge and meaning are not disclosed and here I agree with Sidibé that the effect is one of mystery and intrigue.

89 This self-parody, while similar to but not the same as Bhabha’s (1994) notion of mimicry, does create a certain uncertainty or ambiguity in its latent mockery of the ethnographic subject. See H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 55.

90 Berger, ‘Fictions of the Pose’, 94.

91 P. Hayes and G. Minkley, Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), 56.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Candice Steele

Candice Steele was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare from 2019 to 2020. She currently works at Stellenbosch University.