Paper short abstract:

This talk engages with a selection of photographs taken by Ruth Dammann in what is today Namibia. Approaching the images through the lens of "surfacings" allows accessing the potential of autobiographical construction for African interlocutors and teaches us on aesthetic practices of whiteness.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation engages with a selection of photographs taken by Ruth Dammann in the 1950s in South West Africa and proposes a reading of the biographical fragments, resonances and aesthetic constructions that emerge from the material as "surfacings". I was inspired to approach the concept of surfacings as a theoretical lens for my study by a recent publication by Lewis and Baderoon as well as by the themed issue “Intimate Archives//Autoethnographic Acts” edited by Leora Farber. Instead of aiming for fact-based historical retrieval, reading for the multifaceted, multisensory surfacings of individuals and their stories in so-called “colonial archives” allows accessing aesthetic constructions of whiteness, as well as practices of self-fashioning by two African interlocutors of the Dammanns’ by the name Elisabeth and Bernhard Kahiiko.

As a starting point for my inquiry, I reflect on a quote by Hartmann, Silvester and Hayes. In "The Colonising Camera", they write: “[...] when colonial officials, settlers or outsiders took photographs of the colonised, this constituted ethnography. When white men (or women) took pictures of themselves, this was something different. It was personal, biographical or autobiographical, but not ethnographic.” (p. 16.)

The study of chosen travel photographs of and by the Dammanns’ as well as portrait photography of the Kahiiko-couple in conjunction with other sources reveals how this predominant assumption becomes brittle. Here, reading for surfacings functions as a proposition of how we may engage with ‘colonial photography’ for decolonial knowledge production and as a way of deconstructing aesthetic legacies of the past.