Standing on a pile of rubble with his back to the viewer, Xolani Ngilima is fixed on the cover of this recently published collection of essays in the act of pasting an enlarged photograph, originally taken by his great-grandfather, Ronald Ngilima, onto a brick wall in Actonville (Benoni, Gauteng), South Africa. Taken by one of this compilation's twelve remarkable contributors, Sophie Feyder's documentation of the 2011 informal street exhibition “Searching for the Old Location” visually introduces the reader to several of the questions the authors of this volume engage. How does the publication of African photographers’ previously private collections aid in or complicate the production of local histories? How do curators and scholars navigate the tensions that exist between the complex historical pasts photographs depict and their visual and material affects? What roles do oral histories play in the formation and interpretation of photographic archives that are located both on...

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