Presence and absence: shops as traces of hopes in apartheid Namibia

Abstract

This photo essay shows images of closed-down shops in rural northern Namibia, businesses that flourished in the context of an apartheid homeland but had to shut down when democracy opened up the area to competition and urbanisation. The photographs are of buildings that bear the traces of the people who built and owned them — people who are present in the images only through their absence. The narrative gives a background on the history of local traders in (post-)apartheid Namibia. More critically, it reflects on presences and absences in ethnographic photography. How can we show what we want to show without using people’s faces as our instruments? How do we avoid a photographic presence that overwhelms or becomes too iconic, whilst keeping precision and expression in the image? How is the absent present in photographs?