Affective photographs: Alice Mann’s series Domestic Bliss

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2014, the South African photographer Alice Mann made the series Domestic Bliss which portrays domestic workers in her home country. Only a few years later Mann took these photographs down from her website due to strong criticism leveled at her work. In order to explain the portraits’ canceling, this paper undertakes a close visual reading of the series looking at the ideas of agency and affect. It considers the circumstances that determined the making of the photographs, including the sitters’ living conditions, and highlights the role of uniforms as signifiers of social meaning, juxtaposing the artist’s intentions with the spectators’ responses. Considering the causes and consequences of the series’ disappearance, this paper concludes that a critique of the visual should rather make space for a more substantial critique of the underlying colonial structures, market logic, and politics that create the sitters’ living conditions in the first place.