WHEN YOU LOOK into the face of a stranger, what do you see? Do you gain an inkling of the complexities that living in their head or their body, or with the experiences they weathered, could mean? Can you ever really walk in the proverbial shoes of someone? This is the kind of issue explored in Rory du Plessis’s 2023 publication, I See You: A Photo Album of People with Intellectual Disability. Falling between the stools of creative work and academic publication, this is a foray into the casebooks of two of the Eastern Cape’s archives of people who for one reason or another were considered mentally handicapped by the society of the day, just over 100 years ago.

Indeed, this is a work of poetry, not only in the deeply empathetic words with which du Plessis chooses to ponder the photographs of some of the people who landed up in institutions graphically titled ‘Institute for Imbecile Children’ and ‘Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum’ respectively, but in his curation of the project. The interface of image and text in this small book traverses rich and deep reflections on what it means to look at someone’s face and offer something toward an engagement with who they were and the kind of life they led. Or even and understanding of the fact that they existed, and that their pain remains unfathomable to you, who look at their face.

This is something you may experience in the extraordinary but seemingly mundane body of photographs that illustrate Charles van Onselen’s groundbreaking 1996 book, The Seed is Mine, for instance. There is a photograph there – maybe a ‘snap’ in the colloquial sense – of Kas Maine’s first wife, Leetwane. A long-suffering woman who handled a difficult complex man for years, hers is a life poorly documented. If not for this book, she would have disappeared into ignominy. This photograph embraces it all.

Contemporary South African photographer Pieter Hugo engaged these issues in 2007 with the catalogue of his body of work, Looking Aside, which considered vision and blindness and people who were not considered beautiful in contemporary society. It’s an anthology which changes your understanding of the people you see in your everyday life. For good.

But it’s also a value you may question in your engagement with the work of another contemporary South African photographer, Roger Ballen, who controversially works with the indigent in many constructed and arguably compromising scenarios. And it touches on the way in which the pseudo-science that informed Nazi racist rules of eugenics justified brutality and dehumanisation.

But open this book to virtually any double spread and you will find yourself eyeball to eyeball with someone who is, really, not all that different from you. Each has a name. Some smile. Each has an age, and a diagnosis of sorts. The woman deemed ‘demented and silly’ and thus institutionalisable. The 18-year-old epileptic whose casebook contains not one positive comment about his character. The 29-year-old woman who spent her lifetime in mental facilities but always yearned for ‘home’.

Indeed, there is the 17-year-old who was institutionalised as ‘Unknown’ before his mother discovered his whereabouts and took him, Sipongo, home. Or the ‘umbilical cord’ by way of a finger, given to Gladys that would help her walk. And 31-year-old Joseph, whose epilepsy didn’t deter his mum from calling him ‘darling’.

And you might argue that this feels like a pity-party or a kind of peep show of the disabled. You’d be wrong. In enabling you to look into the eyes of each of these people, and read the words of the young scholar who premised the start of his research career on the presence of this archive, this book gets you to experience a curious sanctification of the individuals as individuals, as you nurse a deep horror for how the system worked – at least, up until 1920. It’s a beautiful protest that touches on the slippery issue of anonymity and intimacy without hurting the identities of the people pictured.

But then again, this ceiling to the notion of the so-called lunatic asylum has not been that clearly defined by the society we call ours. Stories of the ilk of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest poignantly and robustly examines this reality, which dated as late as the 1960s in America, where you could be permanently interred for having diagnosed psychiatric conditions such as homosexuality, depression or being a ‘happy, laughing little fellow’.

In this extraordinary publication which is both demure and groundbreaking, du Plessis offers an engagement with the act of looking and that of seeing. The exhibition is not of artwork or photography in the contemporary, made or manipulated sense. The project is not a foray into psychiatry or its history in South Africa. It’s an appeal to look and to steel yourself, in looking, to see.  

• I See You: A Photo Album of People with Intellectual Disability by Rory du Plessis is published by ESI (Emerging Scholars Initiative) Press, the University Pretoria (2023).