A just image: South African hostels and contemporary South African photography

• Main Author: Bucibo, Nocebo
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10539/27388

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts in Fine Art by Dissertation. 2018 === This research examines the representation of the South African migrant hostels within the conceptual frame of a ‘just image’, adopted here from Roland Barthes’s text Camera Lucida (1987). Barthes (1980:71) used this term to describe a photograph he found of his mother as a child: not only did the photograph offer what he sees as a truthful physical description of her but, also describes the photograph as ‘indeed essential’ because it achieved ‘utopically, the impossible Science of the unique being’, a characterisation of her ‘essential being’. This dissertation argues that despite common narratives about the hostels and their history, hostels have become a complex environment with various structures, traditions, and cultures which cannot be pinned down to their impoverished conditions. Using the medium of photography I also argue that the photographic description of the elements in the frame (a document of past presence), has the ability to trigger aspects which are not physically seen. I describe these affects in terms of their ‘spiritual’ senses. One aspect is memory. I look at Santu Mofokeng in: Chasing Shadows (2011) where he uses photography to capture presence and absence, and to trigger memory which is drawn from one’s subjectivity. I also look at Yto Barrada’s project A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998 - 2004), where she speaks about her hybrid status of growing up in two countries with different cultures. This allowed me to interrogate photographic hybridity and my own hybrid identity, which I have utilised to compile this research === MT 2019