Who invites the archive home? Animating a 1930s queer South African photographic collection through collaborative filmmaking

Abstract

This thesis contends with a previously unstudied collection of photographs made by Irene ‘Freddie’ Heseltine (1892-1980) in 1930s South Africa, now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England. Its historical ambiguities, unexpected record of queer life, inscriptions of aspiration, and re-placement in contemporary South Africa offer nuanced perspective on what kind of history photographs produce, and a case for expanding the zone of enquiry beyond the photographic event. Heseltine’s photographs are simultaneously a queer family album, colonial travel diary, and exploration of landscape as uneven sites of racialised belonging, mobility, and labour. At the core of the collection is the presence and gaze of Heseltine’s life-partner, Petronella ‘Nell’ Van Heerden (1887-1975). The first female Afrikaans doctor in South Africa, Van Heerden was a collision of feminism, socialism, Afrikaans nationalism, paternalistic liberalism, and gender nonconformity. Despite her public prominence in the early twentieth century, Van Heerden’s open queerness and political ambiguities have led to her historical marginalisation. The first half of this thesis demonstrates the photographs’ potential for generating critical histories which move them beyond the realm of description or evidentiary paradigms. Tracing the lines of Heseltine and Van Heerden’s intellectual and social connection to South Africa’s early socialist movement through the collection’s key figures reveals negotiations of identity and futurity through intersecting yet not truly intersectional politics.
This thesis constitutes a “new form of attention” to the opacities, partialities, and imaginaries of the photographic archive.1 In search of whether and how these photographs might find meaning in contemporary South Africa, I partnered with queer South African film director Robyn Phillips to create a short film, Seasons of Longing (2024), imagining the moments before and after Heseltine’s photographs. Throughout the film collaboration and subsequent public engagements across South Africa and the U.K. the collection transformed into a ‘queer’ ‘African’ ‘archive’ and sparked discussions about queer representation, colonial archives, community collaboration, and multi-directional memory. The second half of this thesis considers the film as a social object, immersive sensorial medium, and site of knowledge production as “a form that thinks.”2 As a crew—young, mostly queer and persons of colour—we lent our bodies to both the building of the film world and the visual aspirations of the archive, disorienting and reimagining the real world in which we gathered. The blurring of whose story we were telling and whose futures we imagined and enacted became as substantive a narrative as the film itself, and a reflection on the labours of materialising a postapartheid South Africa.

Thesis embargoed. Available: 21/04/2028

Date of Award	Oct 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Darren Newbury (Supervisor) & Julia Winckler (Supervisor)