What follows can be used as an online repository for images gathered by three artists whose contributions to the field of Ethnographic illustration, what is now called visual anthropology, are singular in the history of Southern Africa: the painter Barbara Tyrell, the polymath George Stowe, and the photographer Alfred Duggan-Cronin. One of its uses is therefore educational in the narrowest sense, as an aid to the further study of three ouvres which deserve wider appreciation and of the epochs in which they were produced.
Although I am glad to be of service in this way, that is not my primary intention. My main aim has less to do not with appreciation, but criticism.
This is not an archive. It is an attempt to put archival material to revolutionary use. As in the films of Esther Shub produced on the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, it's method is to pillage the shrines in which obscure institutions shroud historic relics, sweep away the religious veneration for the past which make mausoleums of museums, and return the concerns of the present to that perspective which grasps all that exists as a moment in the movement of universal history which has proverbially, but also materially and culturally, turned a planet into a village (and universalized the rule of conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families which once distinguished parochial villages from urbane towns).
The gymnasiuam is built of various interconnected sections. It is a work in progress, still very much under construction. In accordance with municipal regulations a warning to this effect has been erected in a prominent location on the construction site. Enter below, if you dare (no hard-hats are provided):
Section 1:
