As evidenced by the rapturous reception accorded the work of Malian photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sedibé, the West has not had much trouble finding ways to deal with the exotic African other. But what are we to make of the exotic same, of the white African? Ian van Coller happens to be a white artist from South Africa. If nothing else this is one of those rare times when ‘whiteness’ matters, when being Caucasian ceases to be a neutral and transparent state of being and becomes an issue that needs to be remarked on. Turned into an unwilling cipher for his race, van Coller thereby comes to share the fate of generations of African (and African American) artists before him. But it also provides him with a powerful place from which to speak, that side on the other side of post-colonial identity, the place occupied by the privileged descendents of the colonizers. Van Coller’s family settled in South Africa in the 1740s, making him African in nationality and up-bringing even if not in skin color. In its self-conscious mingling of European and African motifs, his art practice seeks to articulate the complexity of this identity, and in the process to present aspects of South Africa’s disjointed history through the obtuse lens of personal memory.

It’s a dangerous game, this appropriation of the African. When played by Picasso at the turn of the twentieth century, it was seen as an aesthetic dialogue between the modern and the primitive, a provocative declaration of an affinity of one with the other. But this was largely a one-way conversation and, as such, Picasso’s borrowings also have to be regarded as an act of plunder, a stealing of cultural capital that was equivalent to the economic exploitation of the African continent then being undertaken by the European powers. Picasso may well have admired the bold symbolism of the African masks he collected and inscribed into his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, but he also identified Africaness with sexual promiscuity and thus with prostitution, venereal disease and death. This is the dark side of his cubist masterpiece, and he signalled its presence by using explicit visual references to the supposedly “dark continent.” Van Coller conjures a generic Africa in his adoption of certain kinds of iconography. But now, in an art world that is both post-colonial and globalised, it’s a far more complicated relationship being broached. For one thing, van Coller is speaking as an African and as an outsider (as both, but also not quite as either one of them). For another, his work is at least in part about the political economy of the exchange in which he is engaged.

The central image in most of van Coller’s pieces is a unique modern ambrotype photograph developed on black glass. Its nineteenth-century pedigree and somber tones already speak of history, and of historical process, even before we consider the question of subject matter. This impression is accentuated by the framing of these images. The design of van Coller’s frames is derived partly from the mats one finds surrounding old daguerreotypes and partly from the morphology of African memory boards. These memory boards, called “Lukasa” among the Luba peoples of southeastern Zaire, are often studded with beads and pins, or covered with incised or carved ideograms, and are used by Luba elders to pass on ritual truths as part of an elaborate oral ceremony. Van Coller’s versions are fetishistically built up with layers of olil paint, ink, mud, ash, and powdered pigment, giving his frames the anxious texture of scorched earth, a metaphor perhaps for the ravages left behind by South Africa’s apartheid system. These frames are further animated by elements taken from local folk art traditions (buttons, bottle caps, safety pins and so on) and by the addition of supplementary photographic images (usually family snapshots, postcards, or reproductions of historical pictures). 

Already then we are faced with a series of tensions: between European and African cultural traditions, between found and original images (all the ambrotypes are taken by van Coller himself), between an invitation to touch and an admonition to do more than look, between a big, unruly history and private, singular memories. These are handsome objects - symmetrically organized, with elements carefully spaced and evocatively rendered - their constitutive tensions remain unresolved, and so they should (the work is about precisely those tensions). No longer just photographs, but not quite sculpture either, van Coller’s images have been given a palpable thickness, a physical presence that has to be looked at as well as through. This accentuates their function as sites of memory as well as works of art. As Roland Barthes has written: “Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been,’ modern society has renounced the Monument.” By making his once-ephemeral photographs into permanent object-forms, van Coller has turned them back into mini-monuments to his memories. But he has also managed to bring these memories into the present and into the public realm, transforming them, in effect, into history.

Take Elsie and Genevieve (2002) for instance. The work comprises a curved memory-board frame, its surface cracked and blackened, weathered by time and its own mortality, and a traditional African spoon, hanging vertically beside it, suspended from a black ribbon. The frame’s central ambrotype image features Genevieve (the artist’s niece) seated on the ample knee of Elsie, a woman who has worked as a maid for the van Coller family for nineteen years. This single, seemingly simple image confronts us with the bitter-sweet legacy of apartheid, a system in which love and service, race and class, oppression and generosity, were forced to be inextricably mired with one another. The inset bottle caps at the bottom of the frame contain old family images of van Coller as a boy and images of Gracie and Nelson, two more of the family servants (the word leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, but that’s why it needs to be retained).

These black workers represent van Coller’s main contact with non-white South Africans during his boyhood years. Grace Mngomezulu was a maid in the van Coller household, working for the family for over fifteen years. She came from a rural area at least eight hours’ drive from Johannesburg, eventually returning there to work and, after a mini-bus accident, to die. Nelson Yangairo came from Malawi, a four-day train journey from Johannesburg. During the twenty years he worked for the van Coller household as a gardener, he saw his own family less than once a year. This was a typical pattern in the apartheid era, with people coming from all over Africa to work for white households or in the gold mines, their ability to travel back to their homes restricted by pass laws and sheer poverty. It’s easy to talk about the atrocities of the apartheid system but it’s these less visible costs - the experience of displacement and absence, the dislocation of families, the division of loyalties - that remain hidden from the view of history, able to be measured only in emotional terms (in terms, then, that perhaps that art is best suited to offer to us).

Notice that van Coller includes images of himself in this work, for he too bears the scars of this system. His relations with these people were deeply affectionate ones - Gracie and Nelson were like surrogate parents to him (hence the care-giver’s spoon on its black ribbon and the photograph showing a tender exchange of touches between Elsie and Genevieve). But these relations were also entirely circumscribed by racial difference and the inequities that, in the South Africa of van Coller’s youth, necessarily followed from that. Photographs attest to those relations (prove them, if you like), but an adult, looking back now from the United States with full knowledge of the effects of apartheid on these same people, can’t help but wonder at the nature of affections once taken for granted. Among all its other attributes, van Coller’s work is about the loss of innocence, about memories colored by historical knowledge, and about what happens when personal experience is refracted through larger political and economic realities.

Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of photography at CUNY Graduate Center in New York