'Landscapes between Then and Now highlights a fascinating multiplicity of new "practices of self", and how artists envision and, crucially, embody positions and landscapes. Their personal, sometimes collectively shared histories become powerful archives with which to imagine, map and represent new geographies, temporalities and identities.'
--ArtAfrica
"This book is a highly important and timely contribution to the study of southern African artistic and photographic interventions in the very contested and scarred landscapes of the three post-colonial nation-states."
--Journal of Namibian Studies
This is an extraordinary book for those interested in a more prismatic consideration of the visualization of history at the interstices of violence, race and modernity in Africa; here the landscape itself is the primary archive. Focused on Southern Africa, Brandt reaches beyond the knowing silence photography can engender, to give voice to formerly unspeakable things that perhaps can no longer remain unspoken.
--Erica Moiah James, art historian, curator
Landscapes between Then and Now brilliantly explores how artistic and critical practices of post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia chart a creative and critical path out of habituated ways of looking at the world with a Western, colonial and inherently unjust gaze. This lucid, innovative and deeply ethical study of a range of genres and artists will quickly become an enduring and indispensable book for anyone concerned with camera-based art practices in our globalized age.
--Ulrich Baer, New York University, author of Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma
Landscapes between Then and Now reminds us of the extraordinary enmeshment of histories in Southern Africa in spite of rigid man-made borders and the traumas that came with them. In tracing the work of key artists working in photography, performance and video art, it delves into the complex politics of land and reflects on nuanced tensions emanating from different places, spaces and time periods. In many ways it creates a context for important debates around collective memory and commemoration that are ongoing today.
--Tandazani Dhlakama, Assistant Curator, Zeitz Mocca Museum, South Africa
In this moment of seismic shifting of ideas, of power, and of the ways we construct and interpret knowledge Brandts book is an insightful guide to readers attempting to navigate landscapes both as physical environments, and more so, as social and psychic spaces.
--Nomvuyo Horwitz, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Brandt writes insightfully about the individual bodies of work selected for in-depth consideration. Her underlying argument, that contemporary landscape photography in the region should be understood in relation to the social documentary practices predominant during the apartheid years, is both valuable and convincing.
--Darren Newbury, author of Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa
The past can be owned, just like landscape. The temptation to assert meaning, rather than to make visible, is as ancient as the hills. The writer guides us deep into this overlapping terrain as she examines landscape, memorial, monument and our memory of what happened to us.
--Guy Tillim, South African photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson Award winner, 2019
