A Fraction of Time
- A Fraction of Time: Township and studio photographs in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
Figures
When Zimbabwe’s National Gallery first requested submissions for an exhibition of local photography, the response was overwhelming, especially in the townships. People came to the gallery from miles around, many of them for the first time; they brought photographs wrapped in milk bags and handkerchiefs and presented them with cautious confidence. Contributors offered narratives to accompany each image; they shared secrets with us, sought assurances that their photographs would be safe. We were humbled by their trust and thrilled by their eagerness to be included in the exhibit, to have their own experiences and personal histories become a matter of public record.
The photographs in “Thatha Camera” (take a picture) seem limitless, irreplaceable. Time makes photographs nostalgic; each one transcends our immediate time and experience. A history gathers. Something elegiac accumulates around the yellowing, cracking surface of a photograph: a face, a gesture, stirs a curious sadness.
The camera has often been a baleful instrument. In Africa, it arrived as colonial paraphernalia, along with the gun and the Bible. As it recorded the exotic and profound, the camera altered reality, introducing new impulses and confessions, cataloging the converted and the hanged. The photograph often captured the most loaded fraction of time, calcifying an unequal, brutal, and undemocratic human encounter.
Africa’s encounter with the photographic image coincides with the gradual exploration and maturity of the medium. After the moment of disbelief, when the camera is viewed suspiciously as stealing the soul of the individual, private moments bec0me public. Like the photographer, the photographed seeks something ineffable from the camera. In township and studio photography, each conjured image is a memory, a picture that pursues—or confirms—a separate reality.
Yvonne Vera is the regional director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. She is the author of the short story collection Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals and the novels Nehanda and Under the Tongue, winner of the 1997 Regional Commonwealth Prize. Her most recent novel, Butterfly Burning, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She recently edited Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women’s Writing for the Heinemann African Writers Series.
