Movie Snaps by Siona O'Connell

In homes along the upmarket and largely “white” Cape Atlantic seaboard, through to the dusty and forgotten “black” townships of the Cape Flats, hidden in cardboard boxes or displayed in well-thumbed family photo albums, it is possible to find Movie Snaps photographs that speak to the city of Cape Town and its citizens in particular ways. The small photographs (about half the size of a postcard), which are kept safe by ageing owners and handed down as priceless keepsakes, appear at first glance to be banal, but in fact prompt conversations around remembering and forgetting, ways of life in the city and ways of self-representation. The images are often faded, with curling edges, and all have either a serial number or the Movie Snaps stamp on the reverse (or both). Apart from a few, hand-painted colour images, they are all black and white. The Movie Snaps studio, opened by Lithuanian Jewish immigrant Abraham Hurwitz at the beginning of the Second World War, in a nondescript building at the edge of the Grand Parade in Cape Town, provides a photographic frame that speaks, on the one hand, about Jewish families in South Africa, and, on the other, about the imminent annihilation and fragmentation of lives through legislated apartheid in 1948 – the ramifications of which are still felt and sustained in contemporary South Africa.