“There Your Memory Runs Like a Camera Back”

Abstract

In 1991 Dan Sipe wrote: “Still, video seems to inhabit some sort of twilight zone: many oral historians at least tacitly accept its value and some even use it, but few deal with it or comment on it.”¹ And in 2006 Michael Frisch observed: “Everyone recognizes that the core audio-video dimension of oral history is notoriously under-utilized.”² Is this trend partly due to a widespread technophobia amongst oral historians?³ And/or does the trend reflect negative assumptions about the academic value of audiovisual recording of oral histories? Although different recording devices have the potential to influence what is said and how it is said or not said in oral history dialogues, technological tools should not be one of the defining criteria of what constitutes oral history research practice. I am not advocating audiovisual recording of oral history as an alternative to audio forms. But I am arguing for an equal epistemological status— within oral history methodology and historiography—for both sound recording and audiovisual recording of interviews. Various writers have compared the strengths and limitations of using these differing recording technologies, but comparison is not my intention here.⁴ Instead, in this chapter I describe and analyze the use of audiovisual oral histories⁵ with a view to historicizing people’s movements across racially constructed spaces and senses of place in post-apartheid Cape Town.