Camera Obscura #4: Refusal to Allow Mediation

George Mahashe

The Camera Obscura works ¹ find their genesis in my thinking around the prominent idea of the photograph as a portable image-object whose function as evidence, and its veracity as a representational (picturing) device, obscures the wider mysteries of the photographic scale. After years of frustration with the dominant discourse that foregrounds the photographic as a result of Western modernity concerned with the transformation of European visual practice, I began to consider the camera obscura as conceptualised by tenth-century scientist and mathematician Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham), whose thoughts about light and vision can be argued to have laid the foundation for the camera that we know today. I was particularly excited by this view’s emphasis on the idea of a camera as a space that houses a particular type of observing body, one that is freed from obligations to keep a referential record to validate what they have seen. This concept foregrounds my understanding of a statement made by Diane Arbus, “… I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them” ² , which I see as her emphasising her situatedness as the key ingredient of her photographs. This idea places her at the centre of her photographic practice instead of the audience envisioned by the documentary impulse of showing at the expense of seeing. To me, Arbus’s comment is not about her photographing things to show others, but rather about her engaging in seeing and using the camera to record what she is seeing, which can then be seen by others.

The works I made that developed from this thinking on the camera obscura are mediated by a fascination/preoccupation with stories of a type of magician popular in Bolobedu and the wider southern African region. The stories talk of a doctor who could ferry a group of one hundred illegal migrants from Mozambique to South Africa through the heavily guarded Kruger National Park without anyone seeing them. You would often hear stories of a group of game rangers seeing a herd of buffalo only to realise later that the footprints were human. Such trickery was also used in farms where thieves would see a field full of snakes when coming to steal maize. The idea around manipulating visions often made me wonder how such magic might manifest photographically. The Camera Obscura works are also prompted by my engagement with a rumour of a dream by a member of a Balobedu delegation while they were in the German city of Berlin in 1897. Such a rumour led me to see dreaming as a process of physically occupying a visual space where the objective is not to remember and represent what one sees, but to occupy the dream long enough to comprehend what one is seeing, again putting the body back at centre stage of an infinite visual scale. In essence, the Camera Obscura works explore how one might comprehend the photographic free from the custodial obligations implicated by the photograph. They form part of the MaBareBare ³ project, which contextualises nine years of creative engagement with my imagining of Khelobedu ⁴ through exhibitions, installations, academic texts, and public-orientated programs.

A Refusal to Allow Mediation
Camera Obscura #4 emerged from an invitation to engage with the central theme of ‘return’ for Jerusalem Show VIII Before and After Origins. The invitation activated an impulse in me to reject a position of solidarity that I found to inflate my status as mediator advocating an imagining of return, which I found suspect. It was not that I found the idea suspect because I did not relate to it or felt that it was inherently flawed, but because of its location within a solidarity project that appeared to be involved in creating a united subjectivity based on victimhood. I felt that it problematically occasioned the need for a mediator who could enforce return as a right on the victim’s behalf, rather than claiming a generative and autonomous position of a locally rooted subjectivity, engaging the global as peers.

In response, I looked instead towards me seeing, in the hope that others may also engage in this seeing with me and that, somewhere in our shared seeing, we may become peers and a discussion of the concept of return could begin. I placed the camera obscura in the west wall of the Old City in Jerusalem through an aperture overlooking the boulevard from the Jaffa Gate. The camera obscura’s facilitation of seeing—offering only a fleeting image—refuses a fixed point of reference. This causes the viewer to continually reassess—in the present—their understanding of a position. This refusal is not an attempt to reject the idea of return but to understand how else this position can be located within the realm of action, not as a right, but as a practice. For, in my attempt to translate the concept through a Khelobedu context, return becomes a practice that one cannot escape. ⁵ My rejection is based on the solidarity’s insistence on rights, leaving it open to rejection. It is this locatedness that I find suspect.