Jo Ractliffe - Traces the Ghosts of Loss and Trauma in Southern Africa

Nearly four hundred pages into Jo Ractliffe, Photographs: 1980s – now (Steidl and the Walther Collection, 2020), the first comprehensive survey of the South African photographer’s thirty-five years of artmaking, is a graceful short story by Emmanuel Iduma. “Rendezvous: A Fiction” follows the journey of an unnamed man in an unnamed town who is searching for signs of the father he lost to war decades prior. It is strewn with footnotes, by which Iduma intersperses this story with close reads of key photographs by Ractliffe. These asides provide the momentum for an understated narrative of family mourning and the long shadow of war. “She stands facing seven dangling overalls, held by long strips of twine and tethered to narrow branches,” Iduma writes of Ractliffe’s photograph Roadside stall on the way to Viana (2007). “Presences without bodies, exoskeletal men. They are hung there as if in readiness. Later, when the ghosts come, they will need to be clothed.”