A cardinal figure in contemporary photography, though little known in France, Jo Ractliffe (born in Cape Town in 1961) has spent forty years developing a body of work that probes the imperceptible. The exhibition “Out of Place” at the Jeu de Paume in Paris excavates the archaeological strata of violence in South African and Angolan territories.
“What has always interested me is the way in which space and landscape can retain the memory of past violence,” she explains. “Rather than photographing the instant, I’m interested in its reverberations, in how it affects places over the long term, the landscape itself, and the lives of the people who live there.”
Her images invite careful reading, where viewers must search for traces buried in landscapes that escape any aestheticizing or purely documentary function, without however denying them. “I came to understand that there were no rigid separations between genres, conventions, approaches,” she notes. “That everything overlapped, mingled, and it was possible to work in a way that was at once political, poetic and expressive.”
The exhibition opens with her earliest images, made in the early 1980s with a Nikkormat her father gave her. “I grew up in a generation of photographers who worked primarily in opposition to apartheid,” she recalls. “At the time, the idea was that photography had to be activist. The photographs were easily readable. Clear, in black and white. And they were at the heart of moments of terrible violence.” But Jo Ractliffe, then a young photographer of 25, felt “very uncomfortable with the idea of representing people.” How do you photograph someone who is losing everything?
The 1982 discovery of World Photography, the collection featuring Robert Frank, Joseph Koudelka, and Bill Brandt, proved decisive for her career. “These men I revered, and I spent the following years trying to imitate them,” she confides. But political urgency imposed its laws. Jo Ractliffe sought something else: not to photograph the event in its immediacy, but what follows it.
This approach culminates in her “Nadir” series, where she uses photographic montage to create lithographs assembled in triptychs. “These montages are all made from my own photographs. I would go into the townships after the police had been through. I went to the dumps. I started photographing places that were symbolically interesting, like stadiums that are both manifestations of state power, but also of resistance. Places that imprison and that gather.”
Dogs are a recurring motif in these images. “Often they were police dogs. But also these wild, free, fierce creatures that roamed everywhere.” With “Crossroads” (1986), Jo Ractliffe examines the consequences of forced evictions that ravaged the eponymous township. In 1986, authorities attempted to relocate residents to Khayelitsha. The destruction of homes left nearly six thousand people homeless.
The photographer documents the aftermath of these evictions: debris, collapsed structures, vacant lots strewn with abandoned objects. One image shows a dog carcass near torn packaging, like a still life where violence is read between the lines. These images “depict the impossibility of return, the eradication of all hope, the evident fragility of belonging.”
In the 1990s, at the time of democratic transition, all her cameras were stolen in a burglary. Without money to replace them, she retrieved a Diana, a small plastic toy camera. “The only control you have is whether you put in fast or slow film,” she recounts. “I started using it with no intention of making a series. I took photos of friends at the beach, of my dogs. And I had it in the car wherever I traveled.”
Then she realized the tool’s conceptual potential. “The camera’s quality, the vignetting, that dark and troubled focus.” The series “reShooting Diana” spans the decade 1990-1999, from Mandela’s release to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. “The period between 1990 and 1994 was extremely violent. The apartheid government was trying to sabotage the elections. And our history was becoming very unstable. We were discovering things that had been kept secret.”
The Diana then becomes a perfect tool for that terrible period. “These images are like fragments of truth, fragments of narrative.” Displayed in a grid of forty images, they disturb the viewer. In one of them, a blonde doll’s head stares at the lens amid wild grasses. “It was on a national road leading to the Cape. And it reminded me of a Neruda poem, Head on a Pole. There were many things that spoke of white fear at the time, of instability.”
Geographies of forgetting
This fragmentary approach finds unexpected geographical resonance when Jo Ractliffe travels to Angola, a country ravaged by Cold War rivalries. “In 2007, I went to Luanda. Knowing little about the country, I felt myself to be in a precarious position,” she recounts. “I was immediately caught up in the chaos of this city animated by the energy of the aftermath of war and the contradictory promise of a new future.”
One oh her images shows a rusted sign bearing the inscription “Terreno Ocupado” standing alone in the middle of a plain of dry grass, like the derisory proclamation of a vanished sovereignty. Further on, a charred tree, a traffic sign planted askew. “The peaceful character of these images contrasts strongly with the violence and tumult of their subject,” notes the exhibition’s curator, Pia Viewing.
In 1976, the abandoned mining town of Cassinga became a refuge for Namibian refugees. Two years later, an aerial attack killed more than six hundred people, mostly women and children. “I photographed the two mass graves. They resembled strange giant beds with their pillows,” Jo Ractliffe describes. “The words ‘Cassinga Massacre, 4 May 1978’ and ‘They will remain forever in our memory’ were carved on the surface, barely legible.”
With “The Borderlands”(2015), Ractliffe returns to South Africa, exploring the Northern Cape province. She photographs sites militarized during apartheid: Riemvasmaak, Pomfret, Schmidtsdrift. “I thought about militarized landscapes: places exploited for the mobilization of this war,” she explains. “But the history of land in South Africa is one of appropriation, exploitation and dispossession.”
At Riemvasmaak, she tracks the vestiges of forced evictions and military training that succeeded one another before the land was restored to its inhabitants in 1994, marking the first post-apartheid territorial restitution. At Pomfret, the former asbestos mine housed Battalion 32, composed of white South African officers and Black Angolan soldiers, forced to fight for South Africa.
A moving photograph shows a group of young boys emerging from a corrugated iron shelter, one of them wearing a jersey marked “South Africa,” which had become the geography of statelessness. “Most of these boys had grown up without their fathers, who died in the war. Some only knew them through their graves. The first thing they did in the cemetery was to gather to salute the dead.”
Against landscape
Between 2022 and 2024, “Landscaping” continues the exploration of South Africa’s west coast. Saint Helena Bay, Velddrif, Hondeklip Bay, Port Nolloth, Okiep—places linked to salt, fishing, copper, or diamond exploitation. Devoid of all spectacle, this series manifests an aesthetic of distance and restraint, with Jo Ractliffe refusing the tradition of picturesque landscape. “A friend called my photos ‘boring landscapes.’ He said: ‘There’s nothing in them,'” she recalls.
“I have a real problem with the word ‘landscape,’ because the word doesn’t correspond to my photography.” She decides to frontally interrogate this category. “I wanted to make landscapes that make it very difficult for people to call them that. They have to find another way of thinking. Part of it was getting very close.” These images show piles of rocks, fishing nets, debris from mineral extraction.
After more than a century of industrial pillage, the territory is devastated. Small towns once prosperous lack essential services, unemployment explodes. These images evoke what American scholar Rob Nixon, specialist in environmental and postcolonial issues, describes as “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental, whose calamitous repercussions are postponed in time.”
Gardens of resistance
The exhibition’s final chapter, filled with hope, is devoted to an original project conceived specially for the Jeu de Paume, “The Garden.” “During the 1980s, in the townships, people formed street committees. They were there to reclaim some autonomy. One of the tasks was these peace gardens, on the small bits of available land.”
These gardens also appear as the last bastions of resistance against tourist development and mineral extraction that disfigure the region. “These are communities that are so dispossessed, so threatened. And these gardens seem to say: ‘I am here, and I claim this piece of land, and this is me.'” Whether dedicated to remembrance, survival, or beauty, they affirm communities’ capacity to create meaning in the face of places’ disappearance.
The impromptu encounter with Petrus Mannel, a retired teacher, provides the essential balm for this exhibition’s end. “I met him and I said to him: ‘Why are you making a garden with roses here where nothing grows and where there’s a wind from hell? Why don’t you plant succulents instead?'” His response moves her deeply. “He looked at me as if I knew nothing of the world, and said: ‘It’s for beauty.'”
In this simple gesture—cultivating roses in the desert—one reads Jo Ractliffe’s entire approach: revealing History’s scars, then wresting from wounded soil the promise of renewal.
Jo Ractliffe’s retrospective, “Out of Place”, is on view at the Jeu de Paume until May 24, 2026.
The exhibition catalogue, Out of Place, is published by Atelier EXB and available for €59.
