Archive, injury, and image : imaging freedom through the photographic archive of the racially oppressed

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever (1995) sparked a lively theoretical debate that focused on practices of reading the archive, the relationship of the archive to power, and the gaps within the archive. We need to ask, given the context of colonial and various forms of racial power, in what other ways can we consider the archive? Anthony has drawn attention to the “archive of the ordinary,” and a sense that the interpretation of all archives might turn around questions of representation and ways of reimagining a past. What are the ways in which we can reimagine ways of being through archives that are not constructed by colonial and racial power but by the once subaltern, the colonized? These are some of the questions with which this article will engage, using the photographs of Movie Snaps Photographic Studio in Cape Town as an entry point to consider contemporary issues of the visual, memory, and representation.