Introduction: Visual genders

Gender and History

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 519-537

  Hayes, Patricia ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745433598     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2005.00395.x     Document Type: Editorial

References (46)

1. A selection of Daniel Morolong's work was curated for exhibition by Gary Minkley in East London in July 2003. The collection is now located at the Fort Hare Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Fort Hare, East London. We are grateful to Daniel Morolong for his permission to publish the cover photograph and to Gary Minkley and Anne King for facilitating the process.
2. The phrase comes from Corinne A. Kratz, The Ones that Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). One of the few comments explaining the popularity of this poster stated that the photograph reminded students of their mothers. Anonymous personal communication to Thandiwe Chihana, University of the Western Cape, August 2004.
3. Christopher Pinney, 'Photos of the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion,2004), p. 9.
4. Pinney, 'Photos of the Gods', p. 8.
5. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. xix.
6. See Lisa Bloom, 'Introducing With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture', in Lisa Bloom (ed.), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 1-17, here pp. 4-5.
7. John Berger, Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage International, 2003), p. 282.
8. W. J. T. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture', in Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds), Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies (Williamstown, MA: Clark Institute of Art, 2002), pp. 231-50, here p. 231.
9. On the tendency of the historical discipline more generally to subordinate images to text - History's scopophobia - and the critique of pictures as mere 'illustration' to the text, see Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester and Wolfram Hartmann, 'Photography, History and Memory', in Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds), The Colonising Camera. Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998), pp. 2-9.
10. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing', p. 231, distinguishes between visual studies and visual culture by stating that they are the field of study and the object or target of study respectively.
11. On the pictorial turn in the human sciences and public culture see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), especially ch. 1.
12. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing', p. 232.
13. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing', p. 237.
14. See e.g., Ciraj Rassool and Patricia Hayes, 'Science and the Spectacle: Khanako's South Africa, 1936-37', in Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds), Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialismin Southern Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 117-61.
15. Michelle Rowley, plenary discussion, International Workshop on Gender & Visuality, University of the Western Cape, 26-29 August 2004.
16. The phrase comes from Elizabeth Edwards, 'Photography and the Performance of History', Kronos, Special Issue: Visual History 27 (2001), pp. 15-29, here p. 19.
17. By visual knowledge I refer mainly to the photographic agendas of physical anthropology, which remained in vogue in southern Africa longer than in the metropoles. See Rassool and Hayes, 'Science and the Spectacle'. There is a vast literature on photography and the racial and ethnographic sciences. See inter alia Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), esp. pp. 131-55; Andrew Bank, 'Anthropology and Portrait Photography: Gustav Fritsch's "Natives of South Africa", 1863-1872', Kronos, Special Issue: Visual History 27 (2001), pp. 43-76. One of recent studies to analyse gender more seriously in this field is Christopher Wright,, 'Supple Bodies: The Papua New Guinea Photographs of Captain Francis R. Barton, 1899-1907' in Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (eds), Photography's Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 146-69.
18. This coincides with Gender & History's own push towards a more 'global turn'. A South-South workshop on Gender & Visuality was held in Cape Town in August 2004 as a preliminary step, to be followed by a broader gender conference in India in 2006.
19. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Oyèrónké Oyèwúmi, 'Visualizing the Body', in P. H. Coetzee and A. J. P. Roux (eds), Philosophy from Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 2002), pp. 391-415.
20. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
21. Pinney, 'Photos of the Gods', pp. 8-9. See also Diana L. Eck, Darsa'n: Seeing the Divine Image in India (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1981). I am grateful to participants at the CODESRIA-Sephis Workshop entitled Visual South: Visual Sources as Alternative Histories held in Maputo, Mozambique, September 2004 for their many insights and arguments about different ways of seeing in South Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
22. A problem hangs over the title of a recent edited collection, the otherwise excellent (and at times superb) Photography's Other Histories. While the book deals with previously neglected aspects of photographic theory and history, by default the title suggests that the former colonial world orbits around a single foundational history, constituting plural negatives to one positive.
23. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 53.
24. Students entering Ivy League institutions were subjected to the rigours of anthropometric photography until the late 1960s. These so-called 'Posture Photos' were stored in university archives. See Ron Rosenbaum, 'Even the Wife of the President of the United States Sometimes Had to Stand Naked', Independent, 21 January 1995, pp. 25-6, originally published in the New York Times. Thanks to Ciraj Rassool for this reference.
25. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing', p. 232.
26. Howard S. Becker, review of James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), Visual Studies 20 (2005), p. 86.
27. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing', p. 241.
28. Christopher Pinney, 'Introduction: How the Other Half...', in Pinney and Peterson (eds), Photography's Other Histories, pp. 1-14, here p. 7.
29. Nancy Rose Hunt, 'Tintin and the Interruptions of Congolese Comics', in Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin (eds), Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 90-123.
30. On Grierson's consolidation of the category, see Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 84. On the importance of the notion of the document to historians, and its relationship with the archive, see Ann Laura Stoler, 'Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form', in Caroloyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michèle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (eds), Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), pp. 83-100, here p. 83.
31. See Allan Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive', in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 343-79.
32. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, pp. 84-5.
33. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, tr. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 87. A useful discussion of indexicality appears in Geoffrey Batchen, 'Ere the Substance Fade', in Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (eds), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 32-46.
34. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p. 86.
35. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography in the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 169-83.
36. Pinney, 'Introduction', p. 1.
37. Pinney, 'Introduction', p. 6.
38. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 218; Pinney, 'Photos of the Gods'.
39. Lynching postcards were the subject of Without Sanctuary, an exhibition mounted in New York (2000) and Atlanta (2002). For the more problematic catalogue, see James Allen, Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis and Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Sante Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000).
40. See Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive'.
41. Patricia Mohamed, closing remarks, International Workshop on Gender & Visuality, University of the Western Cape, 29 August 2004.
42. Griselda Pollock, 'Missing Women: Rethinking Early Thoughts on Images of Women', in Carol Squiers (ed.), OverExposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography (New York: The New Press, 1999), pp. 229-46, here p. 229.
43. Pollock, 'Missing Women', p. 231.
44. Pollock, 'Missing Women', p. 233.
45. Apart from their obvious difference from official or documentary photographs of Africans in the Eastern Cape, Morolong's photographs are not as stylised as the highly publicised Drum images of a similar era, which cover urban life in Johannesburg.
46. Edwards, 'Photography and the Performance of History', p. 20, citing Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774-1880 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), pp. 31-2.