Open Collections

Perez Montelongo, Monica Daniela

University of British Columbia

My dissertation considers the work of three South African photographers: David Goldblatt 1930-2018) Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020) and Jo Ractliffe (b. 1961). Through a selection of photographs taken and printed during a period that spans from the 1960s to the contemporary moment, my investigation considers their photographs as interventions into the pre-established colonial history of landscape photography. Their landscape photographs investigate South Africa’s histories of colonization and interrogate post-apartheid processes of memorialization through opaque traces of violence in the landscape. They document landscapes scarred by racial capitalism and its enduring structures of segregation. Their photographs, characterized by depictions of a modest or unidealized nature, unconventional framing, and a remarkably skilled employment of the medium of black and white technologies put a question mark on dominant ideas about the genre of landscape photography both in South Africa and beyond. I reexamine the historiography of the concept of landscape in these artists from the intersecting perspectives of art history and cultural geography in order to establish an historical and cultural context of South African landscape photography that speaks to the political realities of the region. This dissertation argues that the pivotal role of the idea of landscape in the development of the actual, physical segregation of both the geographical areas and people in South Africa fostered the conditions for a critical reconsideration of the very concept of landscape both during apartheid and in its aftermath.

Text

2023-11-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83354

Art History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/