Africa Is a Country

The silence between portraits

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The silence between portraits

By
Tom Devriendt

Number 17 in our 'Found Objects': The short documentary, 'Mr. Mkhize,' by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.

Mr Mkhize.

The short documentary, ‘Mr. Mkhize,’ is a three-month journey taken by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in 2003 and commissioned by the South African government. Here’s the backstory: “… Mr. Mkhize has been photographed twice before in his life. The first was for his Pass Book, which allowed the apartheid government to control his movements. The second was for his Identity Book, which allowed him to vote in the first democratic elections in 1994. Ten years later, we took his picture for no official reason.”

What makes it remarkable is not just the silence in between the portraits, usually reserved for a photography exhibition’s catalogue, but also the fact that some parts in the series (some of them very intimate) seem to carry the subjects that were later picked up by other (South African) photographers (such as in Pieter Hugo’s The Bereaved, Jodi Bieber’s Real Beauty, or Mikhael Subotzky’s Beaufort West and Ponte City).

Watch.

Further Reading

From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans—one from the south, the other from the north—set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?

The road to Rafah

The ‘Sumud’ convoy from Tunis to Gaza is reviving the radical promise of pan-African solidarity and reclaiming an anticolonial tactic lost to history.

Sinners and ancestors

Ryan Coogler’s latest film is more than a vampire fable—it’s a bridge between Black American history and African audiences hungry for connection, investment, and storytelling rooted in shared struggle.