ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three private collections of photographs assembled and curated by four women in Usakos, a central Namibian town, and it highlights their multiple agencies in the domain of photography. Between the late 1950s and 1960s, African residents of Usakos were forcibly removed from the neighbourhoods to townships segregated along racial lines. The collections discussed here document this traumatic experience and they allow us to explore the role photography plays in remembrance and memory work. The chapter’s central concern is to show that gendering Namibian photographic history is not simply about inserting African women photographers into an established narrative that has hitherto focused on white women (and white men as well), but requires us to rethink the kind of work women do with photographic images. The photographic collections discussed here evidence that up to the mid-twentieth century, photography in Namibia was marked by a gendered and racialised division of labour, and women’s agency developed especially (though not exclusively) in collecting and curatorial work, in image preservation and circulation, and in visual display and performance. In order to rewrite a women’s history of photography, there is hence a need to extend our understanding of photographic practices and diversify our archival sources in order to move beyond the visual corpus preserved in institutional archives.
