On photographing the legacies of violence: A conversation with Jo Ractliffe

Abstract

In her work, the South African photographer Jo Ractliffe has been exploring the idea of landscape as “pathology,” how past violence manifests in the landscape of the present. In 2007, she made the first of a number of visits to Angola and over the following 4 years photographed the lingering end of Angola’s civil war, one that South Africa was deeply involved in and was known to White South Africans as the South Africa’s “Border War.” For Violence: An international journal, she has come back on her wide body of work and shared her thoughts on the difficulties to grasp violence visually, the ethics of representation and the ways in which photography exercises one’s critical awareness.