Jazz contacts : envisaging Basil Breakey's photographic remains beyond the archive

• Main Author: Zimmer, Niklas
• Other Authors: Zaayman, Carine
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/11131

Includes bibliographical references. === 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.