‘Lest we forget’: photography and the presentation of history at the Apartheid Museum, Gold Reef City, and the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto

Since the end of the apartheid dispensation in South Africa in 1994 there have been many new memorials, exhibitions and museum displays that have sought to represent and interpret the country’s recent history. This article looks at two major and recently opened museums: the Apartheid Museum at Gold Reef City in Johannesburg (opened in 2001), and the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto (opened in 2002). The focus of the article is the dominant role of photography in these museums, which is itself an indication of photography’s wider significance in South African visual culture. The article also examines the visual economy of apartheid on which the museums depend, and the forms of photographic seeing represented by the displays.