PHOTOGRAPHY AND HISTORY IN COLONIAL SOUTHERN AFRICA, shades of empire

278pp., illus., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2019

First published in the UK in 2019.

Lorena Rizzo examines late nineteenth century Cape colonial prison albums, police photographs from German Southwest Africa, African studio portraits, identity documents, travel permits and passports from the 1920s and 1930s, studies of whiteness and blackness by settler photographers, South African 'dompas' photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, and mid-twentieth century aerial photography from the Eastern Cape to highlight "the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicate rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, or the subject and the object." from the back cover

"An important contribution to visual history that frames, troubles and subverts...the reader is guided through a visual encounter with a range of photographic collections that illustrate not only significant theoretical arguments, but also provide a unique insight, through visuality, into a range of significant themes in Namibia and South African history." Jeremy Sylvester, Project Development Manager at Museums Association of Namibia

Lorena Rizzo is a historian at the University of Basel, Switzerland.