Browsing by Author "Zimmer, Niklas"

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    Jazz contacts : envisaging Basil Breakey's photographic remains beyond the archive
    (2012) Zimmer, Niklas; Zaayman, Carine
    South African jazz photography, both as a particular instance of visual history and as a local site for an international photographic genre is largely under-researched. In consequence, its iconic trajectory, with its interconnected sets of specific historical and cultural contexts, is still inaccessible to a larger viewership. One of the very few books of South African jazz photography, Beyond the Blues: Township Jazz in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with photographs by Basil Breakey, points to the fractured and traumatic history of South African jazz culture. Complementary to this exists a layered, undisciplinable ‘Konvolut’ of Breakey’s contact sheets and fragments. Forensic-quality digitisation and printing procedures open them up as a ‘superreality’ that contains multitudes of overlapping, inextricable traces social history beyond photographic genre conventions.