African Choirboys/Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe

§ I haven't blogged in a minute. 

I felt to share this short piece I've just finished for a Uni writing task - thinking I might expand it a little when I have time.
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African Choirboys/Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe, The African Choir; 1891;
London Stereoscopic Company/Hulton Archive/Getty Image

‘You have no control - who lives, who dies, who tells your story’.

                – Chris Jackon, Who Tells Your Story; Hamilton:
                   An American Musical, Miranda (2015)

Two young boys lean on a balustrade, skin glowing in the studio light, faces turned upwards as though contemplating the heavens, the absolute picture of carefree contemplation.

This photographic recreation of the two cherubs from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is both immediately recognisable and very much its own work -  an homage to the widely known and celebrated piece that influenced it (see below), and an appealing image in its own right.

Raffaello Sanzio Raphael, Two Cherubs (detail of the Sistine Madonna),
(c.1512 -1514), Oil on panel. 265 x 196 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Germany

Here, we see innocence amplified, not just good, but angelic, two young black boys who are allowed to be seen both as human, and as children in a way too often denied in photography of the time and still in much contemporary portrayal of black children today.  Even at the end of the 19^th Century, images of Africans continued to be anthropological offerings – people presented as specimens rather than human, tribal as opposed to individual.  This image from the London Stereoscopic Company offers a view of a different history, one that reverberates throughout the photographs from Autograph ABP’s ongoing archive research programme, The Missing Chapter: Black Chronicles.

This image of Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe, two young choirboys who toured with the South African choir from 1891 to 1893 (Autograph ABP, 2017) provides a counter-balance to the still too common portrayals of young black boys as victims or perpetrators.  The focus on the carefree playfulness of the two children is a thread that runs throughout photographs of them from the shoot: the two boys posed lying on a tiger rug, imitating its roar; one playing ‘photographer’ with the other as his formally posed ‘sitter’; and one image that simply shows the two laughing at something off screen, at ease and emanating a delight that seems natural, however posed the pictures may have been.

The whole series of images making up the Black Chronicles, which seeks to present the diversity of ‘black presences’ in Britain prior to 1948 (Mussai, 2017), is reminiscent of Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album (2013).  Both tell a different story to the one with which we are frequently presented – it seems no coincidence that these particular additions to the archives of photographic representation of Africans from this time are from projects curated by black researchers, demonstrating the vital need for a multitude of voices controlling and relaying our histories.

References

Autograph ABP (2017). Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe, The African Choir, 1891 [image and caption].  Available from http://themissingchapter.co.uk/portfolio_page/albert-jonas-and-john-xiniwe-the-african-choir-1891/ [Accessed 18 February 2019]

Mofokeng, S. (2013). The Black Photo Album/Look at me: 1890-1950. Germany: Steidl; New York: The Walther Collection.

Mussai, R. (2017). Research Project: The Missing Chapter.  Available from http://themissingchapter.co.uk/project/ [Accessed 18 February 2019]