Candice Jansen Receives a 2016 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award

We are very proud to announce that WiSER PhD student Candice Jansen is a recipient one of the African Critical Inquiry Programme's 2016 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards.

Candice's project, BINNEGOED: Coloured and South African Photography, argues that the conceptual and historical parallels between the medium of photography and the identity of ‘coloured’ can open renewed ways of engaging colouredness and theorising visual histories in South Africa. She takes up W.J.T. Mitchell’s provocation -- ‘what if race was a medium?’ – by using the medium of photography to see into the ways in which word, image and biography mask deeper historical realities of race. BINNEGOED locates and examines coloured moments in the history of photography to analyse the ways in which race and image intersect over time and to propose alternative ways of thinking coloured identity today. Thus, Jansen will use colonial photographs to locate forgotten identities of the 19th century that eventually became assimilated into coloured categorisation. She will read the history of coloured representation in contemporary photography through a particular focus on coloured prison culture. Finally, she will study colouredness as creative practice through the lives of coloured photographers and coloured life writing. Drawing on interviews as well as archives, collections and libraries in South Africa, Sweden and the United States, Jansen will consider the works and lives of photographers Cedric Nunn and Ernest Cole, including images by Mikhael Subotkzy, Gordon Clark, Luke Daniel, Pieter Hugo, and Araminta da Clermont, as well as 19th century photographers whose work was archived. In this way her project will help reimagine the entwined histories of race and visuality in South Africa.