On Tuesday evening, Carla Liesching, a South African artist, gave a guest lecture at the Metcalf Auditorium at the Rhode Island School of Design. The event was open to the RISD community as part of the RISD Photo Gary Metz lecture series.
Liesching specializes in photography, writing, sculpture and design, among other media. Drawing on her experiences growing up in South Africa during apartheid, she uses her art as a form of social commentary. Her work has been displayed around the world, including in the PhMuseum in Bologna.
Liesching opened the lecture by describing her use of books as a way to display her art, using a mix of text and photography to create narratives. She often draws on material from historic publications, “cutting and rearranging” the extracts to tell a story, she added.
She also explained that her projects “are never finished, but rather always open to revision.”
Liesching then shared an extract from the manuscript she is currently working on, titled “is laughter ever carried to such an extreme as to bring tears into your eyes.”
To create her piece, Liesching extracted and edited text from the book “Notes and Queries on Anthropology” which was published in 1874. Liesching explained that this book “pushed a doctrine of racial difference, social Darwinism and white supremacy,” and that several portions of the text were written by Francis Galton, commonly known as the father of eugenics.
For her manuscript, Liesching is also using photos cut from “South African Panorama,” the South African Government’s picture magazine published during apartheid to promote the government’s success, she said.
Liesching explained that the reason she decided to use material from these sources was not to “reify their narrative,” but rather “disfigure each of them so that their function is warped, subverted, changed or transformed.” Additionally, she aimed to raise the question of how photography was used to exercise power within the apartheid regime and how it is still used today.
Liesching also emphasized how photos hold power and influence over society.
Many believe that photographs are “neutral, objective windows on the world,” she said. But to her, “photography is not neutral,” since whoever is behind the camera defines what the image says.
For Liesching, within the world of modern photography, there is a need to empower individuals and communities historically silenced within the medium. She noted that photography can act as a tool to establish “solidarity across intersecting social movements” by “making space for conversation to flourish.”
Explaining how we currently live in an evolving society where we see hundreds of images every day, Liesching also stressed the importance of “education around the evolving language of photography and its associated technologies” for society to “more carefully read the sheer volume of images that we encounter.”
After many years of “battling with photography,” Liesching began to integrate writing into her work, she said. Liesching found that writing allows her to “look at myself as I look at the world,” and that it is a tool that “allows me to dig into the past, personal, present, political of my life and the places I call home.”
Her first book, titled “Good Hope,” was published in 2021. The book “considers the use of photography in colonial world building,” highlighting the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which was where Liesching was born. At the event, Liesching explained how the site was once the “height of empire and is now an epicenter for anti-colonial resistance movements.”
In the book, Liesching moves between places and different moments in history. The non-linear aspect of her work rebels against colonial histories, which Liesching says “typically rely on a linear narrative told from one perspective.”
“The fracturing of the singular narrative is an important strategy of resistance,” she added.
Attendee Tanaya Henson, a junior at RISD studying photography, enjoyed hearing about Liesching’s books and said she liked the way Liesching “structures (the books) not just for artists, but for the general public as well.”
