Memory and the afterlives of images: Jacqueline Quin and Leon Meyer, Maseru, 20 December 1985

Duggan, Jo-Anne

Memory and the afterlives of images: Jacqueline Quin and Leon Meyer, Maseru, 20 December 1985

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

Unversity of Cape Town

Department

Department of Historical Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis takes as its starting point three photographic images of the bodies of Jackie Quin and Leon Meyer laid out in a mortuary in Maseru, following their assassination in a cross border raid into Lesotho by South African security force operatives in December 1985. In their afterlives the images, first circulated in news media, have inspired a novel and a song, been used to illustrate a poem and an educational text and repurposed in publications, documentary films, exhibitions, and on social media. Drawing on oral history dialogues with photographers, journalists, writers, artists activists, archivists and exhibition curators, and on literature on the intersection of visuality, psychology, narrative and memory studies, the thesis aims to track the way the images have been remembered, misremembered or forgotten over a period of almost four decades. Interlocutors were asked to focus on, and speak about, the images as they came into view in memory, rather than on a printed surface or a digital screen. This highlighted the complex entanglement of visuality, affect, narration and memory. An analysis of the dialogues suggest that the images live on in memory as objects of affect rather than for their indexical status. Interlocutors remembered their encounters with the images in precise detail, but their memories of the event with which they were associated were vague. Speaking about remembered images blurred the boundaries between past and present, the self and other, affect and cognition, raising into consciousness deep-seated vulnerabilities, anxieties, grief, and regrets that might otherwise have remained unsaid. The dialogues also highlighted the stark differences between the images made by photographers and those encountered in the atemporal and subjective domain of memory, constantly susceptible to embellishment, erasure or reconfiguration. Listening and watching as interlocutors recalled the images, and described them in language and gestures, offered insights into the way in which the conscious and unconscious collude to shape and frame images seen in the mind's eye. This thesis argues that oral history dialogues produce intangible traces of the images of Jackie and Leon, as well as other remembered photographs and mental images. These vestiges constitute a complex archive that loops between past/present, personal/political, and individual/collective memory and brings into consciousness the almost unthinkable, unseeable, unsayable and unrepresentable.

Keywords

Historical Studies

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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