Following the image: Examining the multiple afterlives of apartheid-era prison identification photographs

Abstract

Drawing on debates on materiality, this article investigates the lives and multiple afterlives of prison identification photographs of individuals hanged by the apartheid state in South Africa during the 1960s for crimes framed as political. In recent years these photographs have been recovered and repurposed as part of post-apartheid nation-building and memorialization projects. Under the auspices of the Gallows Memorialization Project, bureaucratic records and photographs have been recovered from the apartheid state archives, reinterpreted and placed into different and new ‘presentational circumstances’ that desires to overturn their original oppressive logic. However, as the photographs and documents are used to fix the identities of particular individuals that the project seeks to commemorate, the logic that drives their reproduction in the new configurations and contexts seems to replicate the bureaucratic rationality that produced them.