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| Title: | 'Binnelandse Reise' (Journeys to the Interior): Photographs from the Carnegie Commission of Investigation into the Poor White Problem, 1929/1932 |
| Author: | Du Toit, Marijke |
| Year: | 2006 |
| Periodical: | Kronos: Journal of Cape History |
| Issue: | 32 |
| Pages: | 49-76 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | photography Whites poverty social research racism 1930-1939 History and Exploration Economics and Trade Ethnic and Race Relations Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
| About person: | Ernst Gideon Malherbe (1895-1982) |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/41056559 |
| Abstract: | The Carnegie Commission of Investigation into the Poor White Problem wanted to study the poor whites in their natural habitats. Having published its findings in 1932, the Commission was the first project of South African social science that attempted to enumerate, describe and explain the nature of 'white' poverty. It was also the first South African commission of enquiry to present photographs as well as written text. It was E.G. Malherbe who contributed this visual evidential record. Malherbe's arguments are important for the understanding of public discourse on race and poverty in the 1930s. The present author explores ways of researching and writing about Malherbe's photographs as historical documents. She first reads the pictures together with images of poor 'white' people from different early 20th-century South African circuits of photography. She then discusses how Malherbe's pictures were put to work as part of the report. She does so as part of a larger effort to investigate how raced subjectivities were articulated within the South African visual economy, and how cameras were used as part of conceptualizing, explaining and responding to poverty. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
