Rethinking iconicity : exploring the iconologies of apartheid-era documentary photography and South African networked social movements

Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of how political narratives are configured as aesthetic issues in selected images from apartheid, #AmINext and #FeesMustFall. The research questions are explored through iconological and hermeneutical interpretation. Sixty documents were collected for interpretation, thirty documentary photographs from the apartheid-era, fifteen images from #AmINext, and fifteen images from #FeesMustFall. The images were coded using the qualitative analysis software ATLAS.ti, and thematically curated using the online whiteboard platform Miro. Additional examples of what I refer to as “politically charged images” (PCI) were added to the Miro whiteboard to illustrate an aesthetics of politically charged imagery. The study addresses three main objectives. Firstly, through a Rancièrian theoretical framework, I explore how an anti-apartheid narrative is configured in apartheid-era documentary photographs, primarily through interpreting selected photographs by David Goldblatt and Ernest Cole. Second, I examine how political images can communicate similar political, social and cultural issues despite distances in time and space. Third, I interrogate the movement of past political images to online platforms and their interactions with more recent politically charged images on online platforms. I put forward the idea that politically charged imagery are constructing imagic conversations on shared social issues through time and space. I offer a renewed perspective on iconicity as a category for interpreting the political messages read in images. In my determination of the word, iconicity refers to the underlying qualities of images that inspires a sense of likeness, resonance, recognition and memory-recall. Whereas previous uses of iconicity have focussed on the word as a category to interrogate the material basis of icons as culturally impactive, my determination of the word stresses the immaterial aspects of image communication. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of the aesthetic image, I position the selected apartheid-era photographs as constructing the politics of apartheid. The affective images of apartheid-era documentary photography contribute to an archive of virtual imagery that speak both to the local issue of apartheid and related universal issues connected to racial injustice, police brutality, and social inequalities. The images of #AmINext and #FeesMustFall are also argued to be affective images that have the potential to speak to other related social movements. In both networked social movements, the activists engage in body politics that make otherwise hidden violences visible. Lastly, I argue that the iconologies of #AmINext and #FeesMustFall consist of several perspectives of the movement formed through machinic interventions, images from the past and images that point to an empowered future for the activists.