As the contributors show, photography is itself a historical subject: it involves arrangement, financing, posture, positioning, and other kinds of work that are otherwise invisible. By moving us outside the frame of the photograph itself, by refusing to accept the photograph as the last word, this book makes photography an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Ambivalent‘s contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories.
Contributors: George Emeka Agbo, Isabelle de Rezende, Jung Ran Forte, Ingrid Masondo, Phindi Mnyaka, Okechukwu Nwafor, Vilho Shigwedha, Napandulwe Shiweda, Drew Thompson
Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Chair in Visual History and Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She has published extensively on colonial and documentary photography in southern Africa.
Gary Minkley is National Research Foundation SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Chair in Social Change in the History Department at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. Recent publications include the coauthored Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts.