Introduction: archaeology and photography

Archaeology and photography share parallel histories in southern Africa. The spread of archaeological fieldwork in this part of the world coincided with the popularisation of camera technologies and techniques, and the photographic record became an important part of the procedure of excavation. Paul Landau (2001) notes that "from the 1870s on in South Africa, wealthy white families went to photographic studios to have their portraits taken" (151), and it was not long before cameras were being taken into the field to establish a range of genres (the hunting photograph, the ethnographic photograph, the study of nature and landscape, and a voluminous correspondence).

This is the same decade in which one first finds a continuous published record of research on prehistory in local journals like the Cape Monthly Magazine and the Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society. The optical empiricism of the late nineteenth century, and the status of the camera as part of a "truth apparatus" being forged by science and police work in modernising states in Western Europe (Sekula 1989), meant that the techniques of photography played an important part in a number of fledgling disciplines, archaeology and ethnology among them. In Africa, as elsewhere, cameras were taken onto archaeological sites to document sediments, record finds, capture mise-en-scènes, and record scenes of camp life (Shanks 1997).

A point of departure for me is a conception of archaeology as a knowledge project of a particular kind, set in modern/colonial worlds of practice. In South Africa, as elsewhere in the first half of the twentieth century, archaeology played a key role in mediating notions of deep time, conceptions of the human, and ideas about progress. It provided a rich set of materials for thinking through questions of race, culture and identity, and a notion of Africa in relation to an idea of Europe. As a colonial science it played a key role in managing and mediating encounters between the Western self – imagined as co-extensive with the disciplinary self – and Otherness: other times, other places, other people. Archaeology also played a central role in encounters with landscape. For a period in the 1920s and 1930s archaeology emerged as the premier South African science. This was the result of two factors. The first was the advocacy of the statesman JC Smuts (1870-1950), who took a personal interest in the affairs of the discipline. The second was a series of high-profile discoveries, like Raymond Dart's description of the Taung fossil in 1925 (Shepherd 2002, Schlanger 2002).

A second overarching interest of this book is in the role of the visual imagination in the discipline of archaeology. What happens when we approach archaeology from the perspective of an interest in visualities? Does it make sense to talk about an archaeological aesthetics? What part has a specifically archaeological concern with sites on the landscape, material cultures, and objectified bodies played in a local history of looking? A defining feature of archaeology is its nature as a material practice. Through the embodied practice of excavation, and through the performativity of the act of site visitation, one encounters the past not just as an idea, but also through the surfaces of the body. Through archaeology one can touch, smell, even taste the materiality of the past in the present. As a result, archaeological encounters are typically overdetermined. Set up as rational, empirical, method-led encounters with controllable pasts, our responses frequently fly off in unanticipated directions: boredom, excitement, pity, fear, desire. In its plenitude and its imperfect control, the photographic image mirrors something of the nature of these archaeological encounters. I am interested in the promiscuous nature of the photographic image, the potential for unbargained-for contents to leak into the frame. Using high-definition digital scans of the original prints, I have been able to work back through the layers of the image, to investigate its shadows and depths. Following a long tradition in archaeology, I have wanted to think about the relationship between text and non-text sources, and that always rewarding moment when – as we say – words fail us. As a set of representative loci, the archive, the photographic image and the archaeological site begin to double and repeat one another. Each is marked by a certain unknowability, and by a relation to what Freud (2003) called the uncanny (das unheimliche, "the opposite of what is familiar"). As such, they deliver up a rich set of themes and motifs: death, disavowal, hauntedness, the condition of the spectre, the absent presence.

"Skildergat 18/7/1929". With note: "These pictures possibly taken by someone else and sent to Goodwin, not his writing on back" (Ione Rudner, 7/3/1979). The Abbe Breuil sits on the fender, Goodwin has his hand on the mudguard, Mrs Harper Kelley to the left in the overcoat.

Archaeology and photography share parallel histories in southern Africa. The spread of archaeological fieldwork in this part of the world coincided with the popularisation of camera technologies and techniques, and the photographic record became an important part of the procedure of excavation. Paul Landau (2001) notes that "from the 1870s on in South Africa, wealthy white families went to photographic studios to have their portraits taken" (151), and it was not long before cameras were being taken into the field to establish a range of genres (the hunting photograph, the ethnographic photograph, the study of nature and landscape, and so on). This is the same decade in which one first finds a continuous published record of research on prehistory in local journals like the Cape Monthly Magazine and the Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society. The optical empiricism of the late nineteenth century, and the status of the camera as part of a "truth apparatus" being forged by science and police work in modernising states in Western Europe (Sekula 1989), meant that the techniques of photography played an important part in a number of fledgling disciplines, archaeology and ethnology among them. In Africa, as elsewhere, cameras were taken onto archaeological sites to document sediments, record finds, capture mise-en-scènes, and record scenes of camp life (Shanks 1997).

For the most part, the photographs in this book are drawn from the collection of the South African archaeologist John Goodwin. Goodwin was a formative figure in the establishment of South African, and African, archaeology, and he practised through a significant period from the mid-1920s to the late-1950s. This period saw the localisation and institutionalisation of a disciplinary project in archaeology. It also saw the development of a substantial amateur constituency. In ways that are both useful and insightful, Goodwin's archive speaks of processes of disciplinary formation in archaeology, and of the articulation of a discourse on prehistory. I have two overarching interests in this book.

The first is in approaching the intellectual history of a discipline from the perspective of the photographic image. What possibilities are opened up through a close focus on the photographic image, that are not available through other sources like written texts? Disciplinary histories quickly become settled, sediment down as tales of discovery and increasing technical refinement. Does using the photographic image as a point of entry allow us to revisit and rethink these histories?

This book situates itself in relation to an important tradition of visual history in southern Africa, in particular to two of the most important works of the last two decades: Pippa Skotnes's Miscast: Negotiating the presence of the Bushmen (1996), and Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes's The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the making of Namibian history (1998). It also situates itself in relation to a growing discussion in archaeology on photography and the visual imagination, most notably in the work of Michael Shanks (1992, 2012, Shanks and Svabo 2013), but also in recent interventions by Frederick Bohrer (2011) and Yannis Hamilakis and colleagues (2009). Above all, though, I have been engaged by the idea of saying something new. You press the button, the shutter opens, and for a brief moment what happens? You let in the light.