OBJECT LESSONS

For the last 15 years, every time I start working on a new exhibition project, I haul out a folder containing a collection of found, black and white, studio-commissioned family portraits. I try to imagine a project circling around these anonymous images. They're bursting with clues, and with private, social and public history. They were shot and printed by Menashe Golashevsky who came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1928. During the early 1930s Golashevsky photographed the black and white, poor and working-class communities who lived and worked in District Six, Salt River, Woodstock and their surrounds, specialising in weddings and in portraiture. He also documented the middle class, Jewish community that he-and I-belonged to. My essay attempts to get under the skin of the ethical and conceptual problems of working with found collections by obliquely comparing Golashevsky's photographs to photographs drawn from my own family archive, and also to images created by Google Street View. A diverse series of images are described and analysed in terms of their visual signs and what these reveal about photography, racism and selfhood.