In this presentation, I will argue for understanding photography as a resistant medium, one that can be used to resist forms of domination and related processes of repression, both during and in the aftermath of catastrophic events. I am interested in both how photographs can work against the oblivion of time and against those forms of history-making that seek to efface complex and painful pasts. I will argue for photography as a medium not only of melancholic attachment but as a way to expose and perceive political time. I will relate this to the work of Austrian photographer Dora Kallmus, better known as Madame D’Ora, and will focus on the dramatic shift in the kinds of images she created in the aftermath of the Second World War, in refugee camps in Vienna in 1946/7 and in the abattoirs of Paris between the late 1940s and 1958. In order to understand these photographs and their powerful affective charge, it is necessary to consider them not only in relation to the body of work Kallmus produced before the war, but to read them in relation to the events that effectively destroyed both her life and the social world she inhabited. I read these images as an expression of Kallmus’ views on society and the practice and meaning of photography in the aftermath of the death camps, which, I argue, can be compared to the post-war thought of political theorist Hannah Arendt.
Biography:
Kylie Thomas is a Research Associate at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, University of the Free State, South Africa and holds a British Academy International Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Brighton (September 2018- February 2019). She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after Apartheid (Bucknell University Press & Wits University Press, 2014) and co-editor, with Louise Green, of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2016). She is working on a book about women photographers and resistance during and after the Second World War.
Her work centres on photography as a means not only for remembering the events of the past, but also as a medium that can inspire action and resistance in the present. Her articles on photography include: “Remember Marikana: Violence and Visual Activism in South Africa post-apartheid”, special issue of ASAP/Journal, “Rules of Engagement: Art, Process, Protest”, 3:2, 2018, (401-422); “Exhuming apartheid: Photography, Disappearance and Return”, special issue of Cahiers d’études Africaines on “Images contestées/images contestataires”, LVIII (2), 230, 2018, (429-454); “Returning History: Figuring Worlds: Helen Levitt, Jansje Wissema, the Burning Museum Collective and photographs of children in the streets of New York and Cape Town”, Critical Arts, special issue on vernacular photography, 32:1, 2018, (122-136) and “‘Decolonization is Now’: Photography and Student-Social Movements in South Africa”, special issue “Photography and African Futures”, Visual Studies, 33:1, 2018 (98-110); “Photography and the Future in Jansje Wissema’s images of District Six”, for a special issue on South African photography, Safundi, 2014 (283-305); “Wounding Apertures: violence, affect and photography during and after apartheid”, in Kronos: Southern African Histories, November 2012 (204-218); “Photography, Apartheid and “The Road to Reconciliation”: Reading Jillian Edelstein’s Truth and Lies”, in Transition, Vol. 107, February, 2012 (78-89) and “Zanele Muholi’s Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives”, Safundi, Vol. 11, no. 4, October 2010 (421-436).
Photography and Resistance 