March 7, 2014
Elizabeth Barrett’s house on Harrington Street, Cape Town
I find Nicholas Eppel’s photographs of Elizabeth Barrett striking because it reveals the intimate details of the on-going, ordinary life of a woman in urban Cape Town. That she dedicated herself and her meagre resources to philanthropic work of caring for orphaned children makes her story particularly heart-warming. But it’s the way the images bring home the frailty and sensitivity of her world, of her home, that quietly stood as a buffer against apartheid and later, the grand schemes of ‘improvement through creative design’ that is the vogue in contemporary Cape Town, that make for compelling viewing. Having been incinerated, raised tragically before Christmas, the images hark hauntingly to a world, a home that is no longer there.
February 6, 2014
“Happy Africans”
December 16, 2013
Nelson Mandela and the Dutch
December 13, 2013
Posters that Challenged Apartheid
October 22, 2013
Confronting Afrikaners’ cultural masochism
October 8, 2013
How we tell stories about cities
July 9, 2013
Nelson Mandela is around like never before
June 28, 2013
A History of Violence
April 15, 2013
Apartheid in Manhattan: The International Center for Photography’s “Rise and Fall of Apartheid”
March 13, 2013
The Voortrekker Monument and “the many mistakes” of the Afrikaner past
On a recent trip to South Africa, I managed to fit in a visit to the Voortrekker Monument, the enormous mausoleum on a hilltop just outside the capital Pretoria. The monument, which celebrates Afrikaner nationalism, was begun in 1938 on the centenary of the Great Trek, and inaugurated by the recently installed National Party eleven years later on December 16, 1949 (the anniversary of the Boers’ triumph over the Zulu at Blood River).