Relocating the Heseltine Photographic Collection at District Six Museum

This paper reflects on the project of returning an historical collection of photographs to South Africa to be exhibited at the District Six Museum in Cape Town, over sixty years after they left the country. Curated by the author, the ambition of the exhibition was to begin the process of reconnecting the photographs to the city in which they were made. Informed by responses to the exhibition, the paper explores: the challenges of redisplaying historical photographic collections; the work of ‘reconnecting’ photographs to the people and places in which they were made; and how revisiting photographic depictions of the past might contribute to imagining South Africa’s present and future.