Settler Country: Photographing the traces of the 1820 settlers in South Africa

该项目汇集了三个研究和实践领域：纪实摄影、殖民/后殖民研究和文化地理学。它包括在南非东开普省拍摄英国定居者后裔的照片，以及如何将历史和存在的定居者文化铭刻在土地和建筑环境中，并将导致在这个国家和南非举办一场展览，并在适当的时候通过适当的评论文章和会议演示以及一个网站来支持。1820年的定居点计划有4500人在英国早期工业时代经济紧缩的压力下，在东开普省不适宜居住的不适宜居住的地形上从事农业生产。该计划代表着英国文化和定居在南亚次大陆最重要的桥头堡。它既被正式纪念(通过保存和促进英语语言和文化的文化基金会)，也被记录在家庭记忆和记录中。但在“新的”后种族隔离的南非，定居者文化和定居者社区意识的地位越来越边缘化。这项以视觉为基础的研究提出的中心问题是：在非洲生活了近200年后，有哪些物质和人类的痕迹和证据表明“英国人”是英国人，它是如何被吸收、改变、保持、遮蔽、遗弃或重新创造的？因此，在所选材料的具体细节下，这项研究是对段落/地理、历史和时间的沉思。正是这一点承诺给这部作品带来更广泛的吸引力和共鸣。殖民和后殖民研究在艺术和人文领域是一个重要的、不断发展的领域，但这一领域的大部分工作，无论是学术上的还是创造性的，都是文学方面的。在理论、视觉和技术意识的支持下，该项目致力于体验的塑料和情感维度，承诺丰富补充更多的文学沉思，并产生将在艺术水平上具有启发性和满足性的作品。制作的图像还将与过去定居者制作的许多图像进行富有成效的对话，从而使它们能够接受新的和反身性的解读。摄影可以提供一种进入前语言经验领域的途径。如果成功，所提供的见解将是含蓄的、复杂的和多层次的。因此，这一项目将是对其领域的一次重要干预，不仅是对具体史学的一种尝试，而且是解决文化地理和时间运作等复杂问题的一种手段。在这方面，它与美国作品有关，既来自南方腹地(Laughlin，Mann)，也与重新摄影(Klett等人)有关，但它超越了这些，因为它被告知了其主题的特定政治意识。因此，主要受众将包括评论家、摄影师和关注纪实摄影的见多识广的公众，以及更广泛地关注美术和文化，特别是当他们参与南部非洲的故事和环境时，以及地理学家、历史学家和殖民/后殖民研究领域的其他人，以及文化研究和人类学领域的专家和非专业受众。无论是在这个国家还是在其他地方，这部作品也应该吸引和吸引更多的普通观众。我过去展出的有关材料的照片在这个国家和南非都引起了热烈的反响。

The project brings together three areas of study and practice: documentary photography, colonial/post-colonial studies, and cultural geography. It involves making photographs in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, of the descendents of British settlers, and of ways that the history and presence settler culture have been inscribed on the land and built environment, and will lead to an exhibition to be mounted in this country and South Africa, and supported in due course by appropriate critical articles and conference presentations, and a web site.The 1820 settlement scheme saw 4,500 people, under pressure from the economic stringencies of the early industrial era in Britain take up 'agricultural' holdings in inhospitable and often unsuitable terrain in the Eastern Cape. The scheme represents the most important bridgehead of British culture and settlement on the subcontinent. It has been commemorated both officially (via a cultural foundation for the preservation and promotion of English language and culture) and in family memory and record. But in the 'new' post-Apartheid South Africa the position of settler culture and the sense of settler community is increasingly marginal. The central question posed by this visually based study will be: What are the material and human traces and evidence of 'Britishness' after nearly 200 years in Africa, and how has it been absorbed, transmuted, maintained, obscured, abandoned or reinvented? Underlying the specifics of its chosen material, therefore, the study is a meditation on passage / geographical, historical, and temporal. It is this that promises to give the work its wider appeal and resonance. The field of colonial and post-colonial studies is an important and growing one in the arts and humanities, but the vast bulk of the work done in this field, whether scholarly or creative, has been literary. In engaging with the plastic and affective dimensions of experience with the support of theoretical, visual, and technical awareness, the project promises to richly complement more literary meditations, and to produce work that will be illuminating and satisfying at an artistic level. The images made will also stand in a productive dialogue with the many images made by settlers in the past, thus opening them to new and reflexive readings. Photography can give access to a pre-linguistic experiential terrain. If successful, the insights afforded will be allusive, complex and multi-layered. This project would therefore mark an important intervention in its field, not merely as an attempt at specific historiography, but as a means to engage with complex questions of cultural geography and the operation of time. In this it relates to American work, both from the deep South (Laughlin, Mann) and in re-photography (Klett et al) but it goes beyond these in being informed by a sense of the specific politics of its subject. So primary audiences will include critics, photographers, and an informed public concerned with documentary photography, and more widely with the fine arts and culture, especially as they engage with stories and circumstances in Southern Africa, as well as geographers, historians, and others within the field of colonial/post-colonial studies, and to specialist and lay audiences within the field of cultural studies and anthropology. The work should also be of appeal and interest to a more general audience, both in this country and elsewhere. Photographs on related material that I have exhibited in the past, have elicited enthusiastic responses both in this country and in South Africa.