Curating Remembrance in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Dialectic of Ellipsis in the Memorial Context of Sam Nzima’s Photograph

Until his death, South Africa’s Sam Nzima was known for his iconic photograph of the 1976 Soweto Uprising on 16 June. This photo, capturing the fatality of the 13-year-old Zolile Hector Pieterson, heralded the representational turning point in the global community’s commitment to opposing apartheid. While Nzima was never memorialized as an anti-apartheid hero, the subject of his photograph is honored with the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum in Soweto. This article discusses this omission in post-apartheid South Africa’s commemorative enterprise. While the article’s theoretical foundation is trauma photography, it applies ellipsis as a viable theory for the photographer-photograph disconnect. The idea of structured absences is also applied to explain the way that the photograph’s author is elided from the public mind. This gap is argued to significantly offer a new approach to critiquing the practice of visual memorialization. The article argues that the photograph’s full historical significance cannot exist outside the context of the photograph-photographer relationship.