Black Photo Album / Look At Me, 1890 1950

Black Photo Album/Look at Me is a digitally reworked archive of portrait and other studio photography, originally commissioned in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the sitters who feature in them. While they are never specifically identified in each image, Mofokeng does intersperse questions about these subjects in the work, which raises questions about identity, aspiration and belonging in South Africa.

These questions go to the heart of the role of representation in the colonial enterprise, and how photography, still a new artform at the time, played a crucial role in visualising unequal power relationships and in offering a means of self-expression for an aspirant black working- and middle-class clientele. 

Artwork courtesy of SABC Art Collection.