Remembering the Lost: On Family Members and Domestic Life

Abstract

Santu Mofokeng’s installation The Black Photo Album/Look at Me (1890–1950), first shown by the well-known photographer at the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, consists of slide projections of a number of digitally enhanced family portraits and other photographic images salvaged from the private collections of ten black families, and which alternate with slides of captions and commentary.¹ The images are ones, Mofokeng explains in the text accompanying the installation,

that urban black working and middle-class families had commissioned, requested or tacitly sanctioned. Dead relatives have left them behind, where they sometimes hang on obscure parlour walls in the townships. In some families they are coveted as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narratives about identity, lineage and personality. And because, to some people, photographs contain the ‘shadow’ of the subject, they are carefully guarded from the ill will of witches and enemies. In other families they are being destroyed as rubbish during spring-cleans because of interruptions in continuity or disaffection with the encapsulated meanings and the history of the images. Most often they lie hidden to rot through neglect in kists, cupboards, cardboard boxes and plastic bags. (“The Black”)

Indeed, as Mofokeng further notes, a majority of the photographic images were “neglect[ed]” ones found in an old box given to Soweto-based Moeketsi Msomi by his grandmother. While the images were presumably of Msomi’s relatives, the individuals they depict were largely unknown, and the desire to identify and to learn more about these people was one impetus for the installation and the larger and on-going social history project from which it stems (“Field Trip Report”).