Rerouting the Blackout: Contemporary South African Photography Amid Infrastructural Collapse

This article examines how contemporary South African photographers are rethinking their medium under conditions of chronic infrastructural collapse, particularly during widespread electrical outages known as load-shedding. Rather than treating blackouts as moments of failure to be overcome, the author argues that artists like Simphiwe Fuwe Molefe and Vanessa Cowling work with darkness and scarcity to confront photography’s dependence on extractive systems and to unsettle its perceptual hierarchies. Through innovations in low-light digital and camera-less processes, these artists lay the groundwork for alternative “alimentary infrastructures,” offering new ways to see and inhabit a broken world.