Albany Museum will bring together two legacies, that of the United States of America and South Africa, in an exhibition looking at the works of two internationally renowned photographers.
Alfred Duggan-Cronin and Edward S Curtis were photographers in Southern Africa and Northern America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Albany Museum will bring together two legacies, that of the United States of America and South Africa, in an exhibition looking at the works of two internationally renowned photographers.
Alfred Duggan-Cronin and Edward S Curtis were photographers in Southern Africa and Northern America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Their intention was to document the indigenous people at a time when modernity was threatening the traditional cultural heritage of native peoples.
Dr Alberta Mayberry, the US Consul General will open the exhibition on 21 May. Shared Legacies is curated by Siona O’Connell and Dale Washkansky from the Centre of African Studies based at the University of Cape Town.
The curators have chosen to focus on recognising these photographs as portraits, rather than ethnographical and anthropological representations.
By reinterpreting these images, they are attempting to articulate the forcibly interred by situating them in the art historical canon, where the genre of portraiture has its own legacy.
The curators assert that it is their aim to translate, remember and re-imagine the images of these subjects that share hauntingly similar stories.
By revisiting these images against the historic canon they endeavor to recognise the ‘truths’ and ‘untruths’ of their construction.
The aim in Shared Legacies is to retrieve these images in order to reconsider the roles of the photographer, the sitter and the viewer.
The title speaks to larger questions of looking, of limitations of temporality and definitions of being human. It invites the viewer to step into the place of the dead; to articulate their silenced ghosts; to speak on their behalf.
It is about connections, relationships and dialogue, so that out of this space, a new way of seeing and understanding may ensue. The exhibition will run until after the National Arts Festival and the Fifa 2010 Soccer World Cup.
