House of Story: An act of youthful and resolute bravery

A new publication by photography development organisation Of Soul and Joy and global photography cooperative Magnum Photos highlights works by four young South African photographers. Titled House of Story, it is knee-deep in conversations about and with photographic archives. The publication offers a storied reflection on the role that photography plays in recording and making the histories of individuals, communities, nations, and the African continent.

In 2019, Magnum Photos needed to re-examine its photographic archive of images made in African countries. Until then, it had been renowned for contributing to the photographed history of the continent through a particular colonial lens — an overwhelming majority of the most iconic images in its archive dealing with Africa depicted the vestiges of colonialism, genocide, famine, poverty, and what Magnum curator Mark Searly calls images of “broken Black bodies”.

“When you look through photographic archives that concern the continent of Africa,” Searly says about his curatorial process for this project, “or indeed Eurocentric archives that have a focus on the southern hemisphere, they are full of devastation. And we don’t see the European body treated, photographically, in the same way — especially post-World War 2.”

House of Story begins at the end of Searly’s curation of 104 images from Magnum Photos’ archive made by 12 photographers between 1943-1991 in Algeria, the then Congo, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Morocco, and South Africa. The images he selected were used by four South African photographers as a foundation and frame for a year-long process of creating new works partly in response to the curated glimpse of this archive.

Photographers Haneem Christian, Tshepiso Mazibuko, Litha Kanda, and Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni made their respective bodies of work in 2019 under the guidance of South African photographer and full Magnum Photos member Lindokuhle Sobekwa and curator Candice Jansen. Christian’s gendered view of portraiture on the Cape Flats, Mazibuko’s framing of “the township”, Kanda’s peering into young Black parenthood, and Mabula ka Ndongeni’s intimate exploration of her family archive place House of Story in the ongoing discussion about the place (and use) of photography in the contemporary South African context.

This publication focuses on what Searly terms the “quiet story”, a narrative that theorist Tina Campt in her Introduction: Listening to Images: An Exercise in Counterintuition describes as “quiet photography… a heuristic for attending to the lower range of intensities generated by images assumed to be mute”. The images do not register sonically as the booming images in the megaphone-like mainstream media; they are still concerned with the stories of individuals and communities, but they register at a quieter frequency that centres people as doorways into the societies they come from.

Kanda’s Untitled body of work wades in the waters of the womb, using the ultrasound image as a point of departure for exploring young Black parenthood. The ultrasound image is, for some of Kanda’s subjects, a contentious documentation of a shameful occurrence.

“Memory: no matter whose voice it assumes, decides what gets to be seen and unseen and thus it must be interrogated,” Mabula ka Ndongeni’s artist’s statement reads for her Umbhedesho wamathambo body of work, comprising family photographs, a handwritten family tree, short written vignettes, and empty pages where there should be photographs. The photographer’s central concern it seems is the role that faith, in this case Christianity, has played in the histories of her family members and the family unit as a whole.

Christian’s lens on the queer community of the Cape Flats in their body of work Kewpie se Kind, comes after they worked on the process of archiving the photographic archive of Kewpie — an apartheid-era queer icon of District Six. Christian uses strong composition to portray queer people living in the Cape Flats in public spaces, in front of and inside their homes. “Kewpie se Kind offers a different eye to see our communities, a different eye to see ourselves, and a different eye to see ourselves within our homes,” they write in the artistic statement for this body of work.

At the conceptual zenith of House of Story, Mazibuko’s Awukho umdlalo ongena babukeli, there’s always someone looking responds to the Magnum archive first by medium and then materiality in order to deliver an incisive critique of the archive’s subject matter. Mazibuko’s images are black-and white film exposures of township life, the people who live it, and structures that house it. The mostly grainy, often blurred images eschew the loud certainty of high-definition photography. This is quiet photography, a body of work that the photographer describes as a “visual poem”.

House of Story is a quiet but weighty voice in the conversation on contemporary photographic practice in South Africa. Photographers in the country are increasingly training their lenses on themselves, self-memorialising and, in so doing, shifting the priorities and functions of the medium in their viewers’ imaginations. House of Story is an act of youthful bravery in which the artists tell a “quiet story” amid the shrill ghosts of photography on the African continent.