In the Darkroom: Family Albums, Injury and Freedom

• Posted on October 18, 2011

I am drawn to the camera and the photograph, entranced by these modern pieces of technology that play with light. It is no co-incidence therefore that I decided to do my PhD thesis at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town on the family photograph, looking to images found in my parents’ home which whispered to me about who I am and how I should live. As a second generation member of a family that was forcibly removed from District Six in 1973, I am searching for illumination in spaces that continue to haunt me, for as much as I try, I cannot shake the lingering unease and sense of displacement that I have with this place, now a dusty and windswept area, the tiresome offspring apparently abandoned by its Mother City. The issue of District Six land claims has reared its head during the seventeen years of South African democracy, often manifested in ugly, private and public arguments. Much like the apartheid city, ex-residents have been divided in drawn out efforts of restitution and justice. I too, am implicated in this story, for, although none of my family has instituted a land claim, the story of District Six inevitably finds its way into family conversations, with nostalgia being interspersed with flashes of anger, trauma and regret. District Six forces itself into contemporary narratives, in that the children and grandchildren and their extended families, however far removed they are from this area, have the story imprinted on their lives. The place of their birth, where they went to school, the conversations they have at Christmas, whom they married, where they will die and be buried, in some way or another can be traced to this space and time. I find that I, too, am haunted by this place that is evasive when I try to placate my inexplicable sense of loss that resonates. It comes as no surprise, then, that I turn to the family photograph, found in the home, in my quest for resolution.

My study looks at the multiple meanings of the place of District Six through the family photographs of four homes in Roger Street.  I tracked down these ex-residents who were neighbours of my father’s family and who were all forcibly removed in the early 1970s to different areas on the Cape Flats. Despite not having seen one another for decades, our first meeting at my parents’ home in nearby Walmer Estate, was a euphony of noise, smells and textures as I asked them to show their own family images of that time.  Although they had lived in the area for years, there were not many images to attest to this, for, as they explained, a camera was not on the list of essential items for working class families of the area. There were the usual wedding snapshots, first birthdays, informal pictures of cricket teams, debutante balls, church picnics and a few from the Van Kalker photographic studio in Woodstock. All had brought several images from Movie Snaps, the street photographers found outside the Cape Town General Post Office and Cape Town Station where for 2/6d, (two shillings and sixpence) passers-by could purchase a 2.5 x 3.5 inch black-and-white image of their day out to town.

The photographic collections of District Six families that I have found, indeed the photographs belonging to my parents, are not displayed in albums of the conventional and often picturesque sort. They are not on walls in their homes, stuck in corners of mirrors, on the doors of the fridge, nor are they screen savers on their computers. In fact I struggle to find these images, as they do not readily come to hand. They are almost always buried in a cardboard box and wrapped, mummified, in a plastic shopping bag. Tellingly though, they are not discarded, they are never thrown away, rather being interred in a spot where at first glance, they appear forgotten, though they never are.

I was taken aback that a few images – certainly no more than fifty – could elicit the hours of conversation which were punctuated often by silences that were just as revealing. These tiny images, most no larger than a post card, paid scant attention to the rules of photography in that they were often badly composed, haphazard and seemed to bear testimony to their photographers struggling with light. Apart form the Van Kalker and Movie Snaps images, very few of them had any notes on the reverse, and it was often difficult to establish just who the photographer was. I was at a loss to imagine these images in a space other than this, for it was in speaking, and in looking at these photographs, that it dawned on me: these images were of ordinary moments in extraordinary times. That, while, they spoke of a denial of dreams, and the irrevocability of oppression, they, too, spoke of resistance as was seen in the dapper young men snapped claiming their space in the apartheid city. They were about moments of being human as depicted in the grainy black-and-white image of strikingly beautiful young women in impeccably starched white dresses getting ready for a church dance. They quickly dispelled any notion that I may have of the oppressed as victims or of the oppressed themselves thinking of themselves as victims.

What can we learn from the family photograph of the oppressed, given that it is – as all photographs are – the site at which numerous gazes intersect? What silenced stories do they tell, what do they themselves silence? What do they represent and how does this representation contradict or re-enforce notions of subjectivities?  It is in these nondescript, ordinary and incongruous images that I find I am compelled to look as I continue to imagine what it may be like to be really free.

Siona O’Connell is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Centre for African Studies, UCT.