Representation of landscape in contemporary South African photograph

This dissertation presents a discussion of contemporary South African landscape photography through a close reading of post-apartheid practices by a group of individual photographers. Land-based imagery has become increasingly pronounced in the work of emerging and established photographers in South Africa since the end of Apartheid in 1994. Recent graduates of public workshop and university art programs, as well as established artists are using landscape photography to examine a diversity of topics, such as: visual legacies of apartheid in the landscape, land use in South Africa, psychic connections to natural settings, and aesthetics of the urban and rural environment.;Through analyses of work by eleven photographers, this dissertation advances three arguments regarding the use of landscape by contemporary South African photographers. First, this study posits that the mode of landscape photography practiced today grows out of the social documentary tradition of the late 1970s and 1980s in South Africa---known as Struggle photography---and continues the legacy of this key period in the post-apartheid era. Rather than address concerns through social documentary photography, many young artists use landscape images to draw attention to social and economic imbalances across the modern landscape, going beyond environmental issues to address land as a site of nation building, and very literally a surface on which visual legacies of the apartheid era have been imprinted. Second, this dissertation identifies the diverse ways contemporary South African photographers use landscape imagery. In South Africa, many late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographers used to landscape images to celebrate the expansion of industry, spread of civilization, and to naturalize the presence of Europeans in contested spaces. Today, however, South African landscape photographers work in modes that are dramatically different from these predecessors. These artists use landscape images to interrogate and reflect on the legacies of apartheid in the urban and rural spaces, and to reimagine their own relationship to the South African landscape after the advent of democratic rule. Finally, this study advocates for the use of multidisciplinary lenses and theories in the analysis of South African landscape photography. It draws most directly upon frameworks from religion and nature studies to explore ways South African photographers use landscape images to mediate a personal connection to land in a post-apartheid context. For many South African photographers, land acts as a spiritual resource, a materialization of the sacred, forms the basis of their community, and offers important analogy for social relations in the nation.