Instant Ancestors - Looking into a Cache of South African Photographic Erratics

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2018-05-10
Journal	African Arts
Authors	Steven C. Dubin
Institutions	University of the Witwatersrand, Columbia University

Abstract

Boxes of old unlabeled photographs are commonly featured at flea markets worldwide. Some enterprising vendors dub them “instant ancestors,” hawking the prospect of acquiring fictive kin and ersatz genealogies to new publics. These traders peddle style over substance and invite their customers to conjure up backstories for signifiers that have lost their indexicality. In essence they stoke peoples’ penchant for nostalgia. As objects that are commonly imbued with strong sentiments (Barthes 1981), photos enable individuals to fabricate memories and to project their contemporary needs and concerns onto depreciated material.This inquiry is based upon an unexpected archive: unclaimed material from a frame and photo developing shop in Johannesburg, South Africa. It expands upon numerous investigations into the visual economies and biographies of photographs. For example, Cohen (2014) and Feyder (2015) worked with caches of negatives that were found by chance or stored away for decades. In the first instance, the researcher’s primary interests lay with the ethical implications of image making and display. In the second, the goal was to reconnect members of the “source community” of a particular photographer’s work. The research strategies of both trumped performing a close analysis of the photos themselves.Moreover, Haney (2013) investigated family-run studios in West Africa; the elite customers of these places have passed down portraits for generations, and the identities of both creator and subject thus remain discernible. Nimis (2013) similarly looked at networks of Yoruba studio photographers. Once again, knowing the source is critical to understanding aspects of the production side of image making, such as the contribution of distinctive professional styles and norms. While all these studies make important contributions to understanding African photography, the application of their insights is limited in the case of anonymous or semi-anonymous images, their creators, and their owners.Other scholars have directed a great deal of attention to studio photographers such as Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe in Mali, and more recently to relative unknowns such as South Africa’s S.J. “Kitty” Moodley (Dubin 2014), Ronald Ngilima (Feyder 2015) and Daniel Morolong (McNulty 2014). Of special note are the opportunities that studios offered for flights of fantasy and aspirational self-fashioning, often under oppressive social conditions (see, e.g., Behrend 1998; Wendl 2001).It is impossible to calculate the volume of unidentified photographs that survive in marketplaces, archives, household cupboards and drawers, in trash dumps—virtually anywhere, for that matter. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assert that they encompass a vast but under-researched field that exists beyond the focal boundaries that prior researchers of African photography have mapped. This investigation suggests some ways of going forward to understand such phenomena.In 2014 I purchased over 800 personal photographs and documents from Ravi Lalla, the owner of Popular Picture Framers and General Dealer in Johannesburg. I had heard passing references a number of times to a photo shop that operated on the southeastern edge of the city. When I watched the documentary Jeppe on a Friday (Walsh and Lalloo 2012), Lalla’s appealing appearance as one of film’s featured subjects confirmed that the business continues to exist.The first time I visited I was in awe of his shop, packed as it was with sample frames, kitschy artwork, thousands of chromolithographs of Biblical scenes, makarapa1 left over from the FIFA 2010 World Cup competition, African curios produced for the tourist market, and promotions for local products and services, such as cell phone carriers: “Yebo, Gogo! [Yes, Granny]” (Fig. 1).Lalla has deep roots in this precinct that is known as Jeppestown, which once bustled with Indian-owned shops. This is where he was born and raised, and his father was one of dozens of tailors working in the vicinity. The buildings largely remain in Indian hands, but many of them now house businesses run by a cross section of South Asians, as well as Africans from other countries, including Ethiopians, Nigerians, and Ghanaians. Lalla launched this business in 1978 along with three family members, but he is now sole proprietor. The shop is unlikely to exist more than a few years longer: he anticipates retirement on the horizon, and no relative has interest in taking it over.2To gain a sense of the surrounding terrain, imagine placing the needle point of a drafting compass onto a map at the Albertina Sisulu Road off ramp from busy Joe Slovo Drive. Placing the device’s pencil a few blocks away in a southeasterly direction, a clockwise turn lands you in Jeppestown.What was a prime residential enclave during Johannesburg’s early history in the late nineteenth century evolved into a poor and working class district during the twentieth. In the mind of the local public, Jeppestown is closely identified with the Wolhuter Hostel, generally referred to as the Jeppe Hostel. The city council erected it in 1932 to house male migrants who continue to flock to the metropole to earn money in order to support their rural-based families. A board of inquiry into factional violence in the early 1990s dubbed squalid accommodations such as these “fortresses of fear” (Ackermann 1992).3Jeppestown was also the site of eruptions of xenophobic violence in 2008 and 2015, primarily directed at Africans from elsewhere on the continent who have been driven from their homes by political turmoil or economic necessity, or have arrived on their own initiative to pursue business opportunities. Popular Picture Framers and General Dealer is sited near the hostel, set into the corner of a row of two-story commercial buildings bearing a suspended balcony. This quaint architectural embellishment shelters those on the sidewalk from sun or rain but survives only on a steadily diminishing number of historic Johannesburg locations (Fig. 2).Continue the revolution of the compass another quarter turn. Passing numerous panel beating shops and residential buildings seized by gangsters for their own financial gain, you will see the Kwa Mai Mai Market (offering a vast assortment of African goods);4 skirt Jewel City (a fortress-like diamond and gold processing center); and pass by the edge of the Fashion District, site of hundreds of small design and tailoring operations.Your arc also now encompasses the Maboneng Precinct (Sesotho for “place of light”), an assemblage of warehouses and disused factories that have recently been repurposed into upscale high-security apartments, galleries, co-working spaces, restaurants and bars. One critic of the project—and there are many—remarked, “Maboneng is a false tooth in a whole set of teeth … If you think of a veneer it looks just like the other teeth … [but] it’s not real” (Rees 2013).This landscape is rife with contradictions: Popular Picture Framers and General Dealer is flanked by privilege and despair. Its location embodies residues of the apartheid city along with a prime vantage point onto substantial urban transformation. As the social topography of the neighborhood changes, enterprises such as Lalla’s represent a layer of bedrock that is gradually becoming submerged by post-apartheid forces and events, such as the aforementioned in-migration and ongoing cycles of central city abandonment and reuse.The selection of material that I purchased had been entrusted to Lalla by a multitude of people throughout the 1990s to be copied, enlarged or framed. Lalla places every order he receives within an envelope, each of which bears the customer’s name; the desired service; sometimes an address, but not always; and the date it came to the shop. Although these possessions were brought to Lalla during a specific decade, their origins span the pre- and post-apartheid eras, and the forty-plus years falling in between.At one time these items held significance for their owners, yet they remained unclaimed, even though Lalla requires his customers to leave a cash deposit for work they wish to have done. This is somewhat analogous to how pawnshops operate. In this instance, however, the customers lose their money as well as their items if they do not follow through with a transaction, and what remains possesses scant intrinsic value.The photos were produced in either black and white or in color. They range from casual snapshots of people to formal studio portraits; reflect both the sort of blunders indicative of an amateur’s hand as well as the expertise of the professional. The work consists, in other words, of a mélange of styles, subject matter, and sizes, thereby representing the broad span of the medium.I discovered them in two large dust-covered boxes stowed upon the top shelf of a crowded back workroom-cum-storeroom, and in a sizable box resting on the floor. Accessing them required delicately moving, shuffling, and balancing frames, tools, and the detritus of a long-established business. As the years pass Lalla consigns orders that he doubts will ever be reclaimed to this repository, keeping only unredeemed ones from more recent years in the shop proper.I looked through all the envelopes containing orders that were stashed away in these boxes and bought the 800 items—perhaps a third of the total of what I saw. I did not have fixed selection criteria in mind; in fact, I was somewhat dumbstruck when I learned that Lalla held onto such an inventory, and moreover, that his staff would so quickly consent for me to sift through it during my first visit. I was most drawn to depictions of celebrations and gatherings; individuals wearing customary clothing and/or beadwork; those clad in brightly colored or wildly patterned fabrics; images taken many decades ago, embossed with the patina of age; and documents that reflected notable achievements or recorded important biographical information. Much of what I rejected would likely hold minimal interest to anyone without a direct connection to the people represented, such as identity photos or conventional candid shots, the sort of representations that Batchen describes as banal, boring, ubiquitous and “repetitively uncreative” (2008: 121, 124, 132, 123).These artifacts encompass a vast geographic as well as chronologic range, in some instances made evident by inscriptions written on the reverse of photos, or in the case of documents, marked on the front. They include an earnest and lovingly crumpled 1947 wedding portrait (Fig. 3), and a 1992 certificate of completion of training in internal security by the Suid-Afrikaanse Polisie (South African Police);5 span from birth and baptismal certificates, to government-issued permits allowing foreign nationals to be in the country, or records of lengthy service to a company or in recognition of finishing a correspondence course, “How to Be a Good Christian.”In addition to the shop’s patronage by local residents, the original owners of many of these personal effects were undoubtedly Africans who came to Johannesburg for employment. The address many of them provided was the aforementioned nearby single-sex hostel for male workers; Lalla confirms that residents from there have always accounted for a substantial portion of his clientele. Drawn from throughout South Africa as well as beyond its borders, e.g., Mozambique, these workers left their cherished photographs and important records behind.This collection was thus formed through happenstance. It is difficult to resist the temptation to reflect on the circumstances that may have brought the individual pieces together: an abrupt departure by the owners from the city, for example, due to injury or some crisis at home. Perhaps a rupture in the relationship between an individual depicted in a photo and its owner or intended recipient. Possibly being cash-strapped and unable to pay the balance due. Or even death.To examine this material en toto requires embracing a “methodology of the discarded,” an approach I have previously used to explore “symbolic slavery,” items of black memorabilia that end up in flea markets or second-hand shops (Dubin 1987), and a collection of photographic negatives that had been disposed of by a museum (Dubin 2014). Or, as sociologist Olga Sezneva puts it when describing the veneration of everyday items from the period of Soviet rule that are dug up and sold in informal markets, “The ontology of junk is anchored in the act of digging…. [Digging] reverses the erosion of space through time” (2007: 22, 16). The convergence of such bits and pieces in Lalla’s back rooms is not purposeful as much as it is serendipitous.This investigation contrasts with ones based upon the output of a particular producer or studio (Nwafor 2010), material organized thematically (Weinberg 2006), or characteristic of established genres (Cole 1967; Chikane 1989). In order to understand these photos as thoroughly as possible, and based upon my own familiarity with South African art and culture, I interviewed approximately twenty-five people in 2015 in the three major cities in the country: Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. They included curators, collectors, and field runners [procurers] of traditional African art and material culture, and some amaZulu I am acquainted with as well. I showed each of them an assortment I had put together of about forty images.In what follows I will highlight a smaller sample of photos and documents from Popular Picture Framers and General Dealer using the rubric of erratics. In literature, an anachronism is an element that appears out of its original time or place. Analogous to this in geology is the glacial erratic: from the Latin errare (to wander, to roam), it refers to a rock or boulder that has been carried along by an ice flow and then scattered, willy-nilly, as melting occurs, in a location that can be far removed from the point of origin. An erratic is thus an environmental anomaly, differing in composition from its surrounds. In many instances, because of its sheer size, it sticks out from the landscape like a proverbial sore thumb. Plymouth Rock may be the most famous example in America, but Fantastic Erratic (near Seattle) and Head-Smashed-In (Alberta, Canada) outshine it by their evocative names. This does not exhaust the word’s meanings, of course. More typically, erratic denotes deviating from the usual course, wandering or straying, as well as inconsistency and unpredictability.What if we expand this concept to the cultural realm? What happens when photographs such as the ones I found at Lalla’s shop get swept up by circumstance and are then dumped in unexpected places? Simply by their waywardness, they have lost one of their intrinsic properties: the capacity to contain and convey particular memories. Battered and commonly stripped of key identifying information, and with the outlines of their journeys often untraceable, can we nonetheless plumb their meanings and identities?The essence of this collection is its character as a memorial park of untethered, semi-anonymous remnants of peoples’ lives; some selected examples embody the temporal and spatial dislocations of erratics particularly well. I will also highlight a sense of absence and longing amongst family and friends, between parents and children, lovers and comrades. While photos can be a binding agent that helps people hold fast to one another, the connective tissue that reveals, sustains, and restores essential human relationships, labor migrancy and such I will explore how the of such as and personal or what is being this investigation is and I will examine objects that under other circumstances for for their owners, but are more with an to understanding their and This selection of from the to the the personal to the from the of the studio to the of local and traditional as well as It is a cross section of the South African in the approach will three of the social and cultural social the and of these the of the erratic and the and close of this visual and of the that people first and at General Picture Framers and General Dealer is The photographs into the and remnants and of people with they are not ever likely to be to these images in is a century may their and the with which their have now As cultural all their all family the In other words, the specific with which photos were once have been the of the memories they held has The particular thus into the the I this of images from the Popular Picture Framers and General Dealer collection by them into is an identity by other documents that were from Ravi Lalla’s shop, it was brought in for the of photo This particular or was set by the apartheid to that the amaZulu not hold in the in as a was one of such the of each based upon drawn It with the of a upon the of apartheid in thereby the addition to this of an African and working in an urban of South Africa under apartheid was required to an a for the government-issued that was key to keeping it in order Nevertheless, would not from being into on a an individual into a being within a set for not an by the would a into The of the of being without is what the of the owner of this to it and suggests the of in Johannesburg. 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It was also a period when the between the and the for political had a large that may be a for a in the has to the wearing of clothing … with a of this example it is that such a at this Although identity has this those friends, and who would most this of have been the to do for years is at in as well. 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Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00404

References

1992 - Fortresses of Fear.” Independent Board of Inquiry Records 1989-1996
1981 - Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
1996 - Zulu Treasures: Of Kings and Commoners: A Celebration of the Material Culture of the Zulu People; Amagugu kaZulu: amakhosi Nabantukazana umgubho wezinto ezihambisana namasiko amaZulu
1989 - Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa
2015 - Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive
1967 - House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today