Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa is a rich and in-depth study of the relationship between photography and colonial history at the turn of the 20th century. Lorena Rizzo highlights the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicates rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, and the subject and the object.
Rizzo argues that rather than understanding photographs primarily as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can also value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction.
