• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: ‘Bang-Bang Has Been Good to Us’
  • Contributor: Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn
  • Published: SAGE Publications, 2010
  • Published in: Theory, Culture & Society, 27 (2010) 7-8, Seite 214-237
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1177/0263276410383711
  • ISSN: 0263-2764; 1460-3616
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: This article considers the changing perceptions, expressions and representations of violence in South Africa post-1994, with particular reference to photography. Following the evolution of the documentary tradition in its relationship to the political history of South Africa, I will suggest that since the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in South Africa, photography has taken a new turn, particularly with regard to its representation of violence, which had been its primary iconography up to that watershed moment. I will follow three arguments (from Sartre, Benjamin and Mbembe) in my explication of the ways in which violence has both altered South African society and assumed a different place in the collective mind of South Africans living in a country that is politically free but grappling with an ever-rising wave of violent crime.