A Local Habitation: Photographing Settler Buildings in South Africa's Eastern Cape

拟议的研究将包括制作殖民存在影响的证据的照片，更具体地说，对南非东开普省小城镇的建筑环境(具体建筑和一般城镇景观)的“不列颠性”的影响。1820年，4000名定居者在政府支持的计划下抵达南非，这是英国人向南非进行的最大规模移民的所在地。定居者包括广泛的阶级和职业，他们逐渐克服了当地政治和不适宜居住的自然环境的问题，建立了一些小城镇和伊丽莎白港。许多19世纪的“定居者”建筑仍然保留着，还有更多最近的种族隔离和现在的后种族隔离时代的证据。因此，该地区的建筑环境提供了一个精确的痕迹，显示了讲英语的南非白人文化在雄心、协调和命运方面的物质和文化上的变化。特别是，该地区的小城镇的特点是可以追溯到19世纪中叶的大量民用、乡土和住宅建筑，但现在非常广泛地表现为后殖民时期的重新征用或忽视。因此，它们成为了解他们的文化及其当代状况的详细遗物。被选中的城镇都带有强烈的后殖民迹象，因为它们在很大程度上被白人中产阶级抛弃，被当地社区侵占。这使得它们和它们的建筑成为一个变化和过渡过程的图形视觉晴雨表。事实上，该项目与存在和存在一样，都与通过和短暂有关，并且植根于可见证据的模棱两可。因此，与其说它是试图编目或记录，不如说是对它自己制造的特定遭遇的追踪。在这方面，它触及了摄影和纪录片实践中的重要问题。该项目将把定居者经历的模糊性作为其基本假设，承认当前的后殖民时代，以及英国人在国外的命运和变化，因此它将引起历史学家、文化地理学家和人类学家以及那些与视觉文化和纪实摄影有更直接关系的人的兴趣。在这些重叠的领域内，它属于相关的传统，适当地自我反省，并避免在描绘“他者”时经常涉及的简单化和意识形态扭曲。在摄影方面，这项工作将集中在制作传统的基于暗室的单色照片上。在一个普遍数字化的时代，这种媒介的潜在用途及其提出的认识论问题，是该项目将实践作为研究维度的一个重要因素。这个项目是在我的AHRC资助的项目“定居者之国”的基础上发展起来的，该项目现已接近完成。《Settler Country》使用单色纪实摄影，通过描绘后裔和定居者在风景中存在的痕迹来观察1820名定居者的遗产，集中在下奥尔巴尼地区。“当地居住”将建立在这项工作和由此产生的理解的基础上，同时扩大要覆盖的地理地形，同时对主题和摄影表现采取更集中和有选择性的方法。该作品将在南非和这个国家展出，并将被整理成网站(我精通网站设计和建设)，并作为一本书出版。

The proposed research will consist of the making of photographs of the evidence of the influence of colonial presence and, more particularly, 'Britishness' on the built environment (both specific buildings and general townscapes) of small towns in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This area was the site of the single biggest migration of British people to South Africa, when 4000 settlers arrived under a government-sponsored scheme in 1820. Comprising a broad range of classes and occupations the settlers gradually overcame the problems of local politics and the inhospitable natural environment, to establish a number of small towns, and the city of Port Elizabeth. Much 19th century 'settler' architecture still remains, alongside more recent evidence of the Apartheid and, now, post-Apartheid, eras. The built environment of this region therefore provides a precise trace of the shifts, both material and cultural, in the ambitions, co-ordinates and fortunes of Anglophone white South African culture. Particularly, the smaller towns of the region are characterised by a wealth of civic, vernacular and domestic building dating back as far as the middle of the 19th century, but now very broadly characterised by post-colonial reappropriation, or neglect. They therefore serve as a detailed reliquary of the culture that informed them, and of its contemporary condition. The towns chosen are all strongly marked by signs of the 'post-colonial', inasmuch as they have been largely abandoned by the white middle class, and appropriated by local communities. This makes them, and their buildings, graphic visual barometers of a process of change and transition. Indeed, the project has as much to do with passage and transience as with presence, and is grounded in the ambiguities of visible evidence. It is therefore not an attempt at a catalogue or record so much as a trace of the particular encounters of its own making. In this respect it touches on vital questions in photographic and documentary practice. This project will take as its founding assumption the ambiguities of the settler experience, This acknowledges the present post-colonial moment, and the fate and inflections of Britishness abroad, and as such it will be of interest to historians and cultural geographers and anthropologists, as well as to those more directly concerned with visual culture and with documentary photography. Within these overlapping fields it falls within traditions concerned to be appropriately self-reflexive and to avoid the simplifications and ideological distortions often involved in portrayal of the 'other'. Photographically, the work will be centred on the making of traditional darkroom-based monochrome prints. The potential uses of, and epistemological questions posed by, this medium in an age of universal digitisation, are an important element of the practice-as-research dimensions of the project. The project grows from my AHRC-funded project 'Settler Country' that is now nearing completion. 'Settler Country' uses monochrome documentary photography to look at the heritage of the 1820 settlers via portraiture of descendents and traces of settler presence in the landscape, and is concentrated in the lower Albany area. 'A Local Habitation' will build on this work and the understandings derived through it, by simultaneously expanding the geographic terrain to be covered, while taking a more concentrated and selective approach to subject-matter and photographic representation. The work will be exhibited both in South Africa and in this country, and will be collated for a web site (I am proficient in website design and construction) and for publication as a book.