A just image: South African hostels and contemporary South African photography
Date
2018
Authors
Bucibo, Nocebo
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Abstract
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
Description
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
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Citation
Bucibo, Nocebo. (2019). A just image :South African hostels and contemporary South African photography. University of the Witwatersrand, https://hdl.handle.net/10539/27388