Jo Ractliffe on memory, distance, and the quiet persistence of history across four decades of photographic practice.
15 April 2026
Spanning more than forty years, ‘Out of Place’ brings together over two hundred images that trace Jo Ractliffe’s sustained engagement with landscape as a charged and unstable terrain. Ractliffe reflects on the evolving language of her practice, in which histories of colonialism, apartheid, and conflict surface not as spectacle but as residue. Attuned to ambiguity, slowness, and the limits of photographic representation, her work resists resolution, inviting viewers into a space where meaning remains contingent and the past persists in quiet, often imperceptible ways.
Jo Ractliffe, doll’s head from the series, reShooting Diana, 1990-99. © Jo Ractliffe.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Out of Place’ brings together works made across more than forty years of your practice. When these images are seen in dialogue, what continuities or shifts emerge in how you have approached landscape as a space where political histories and personal memory intersect?
Jo Ractliffe: It’s a real privilege to have an exhibition of this scale – spanning such a time frame. It offers a rare opportunity to reflect on the trajectory of my work. There are roughly thirty images from the early 1980s that show my attempts to emulate my heroes -those quick-draw, Leica-wielding photographers who radicalised photography in the 1950s. But beyond exploratory forays into street photography and portraiture, it’s clear that my interest in landscape and violence was there from the beginning.
What strikes me most is how my understanding of this interest has developed, and with it, the ways I have articulated my concerns photographically. In the early landscapes, I see how tentative my seeing was, how I lacked a more complex understanding of why I was drawn to particular places and what resonated for me in them. My attempts to find language – to comprehend intellectually what I was doing intuitively – are also evident. There’s a kind of dogged persistence in my attempts to resolve those questions formally – exploring various photographic modes and forms, such as photomontage, or using plastic cameras.
Even then, though, I was grappling with the idea of landscape as something already inscribed, already carrying the weight of human action and omission. Over time, I think I’ve come to understand that more clearly. What has remained constant is an understanding of landscape as a repository of political history and personal encounter – a space where these often-uneasy registers coexist. Across the work, there is also a sustained preoccupation with landscape as unstable, where histories sediment and fracture simultaneously. And also, a continuity in an attentiveness to how the political is embedded in the physical, and how memory – both personal and collective – resides in the terrain, often in ways that resist articulation.
Jo Ractliffe, Donkey, Pomfret Asbestos Mine from the series The Borderlands, 2011. © Jo Ractliffe.
Your photographs often turn to landscapes shaped by the aftermath of colonialism, apartheid, and regional conflict, yet the violence embedded in these sites rarely appears directly. What interests you about working with landscapes where history is present as a residue or atmosphere, rather than as an explicit event?
I’ve never felt compelled to photograph violence at the moment of its occurrence. What interests me is how events linger on over time. It fascinates me how these traces can be both elusive and insistent at once. In many of the places I’ve worked, the violence is dispersed. It can reside in structures, as in a road cutting through a terrain, or in how a site is avoided or reclaimed. To photograph these landscapes is to engage with an aftermath in which history is no longer event-based but atmospheric. That indirection feels more truthful to the complexity of these histories.
Working in Angola was illuminating. Often, when I was photographing, a place might initially appear unremarkable, almost benign. Only later did I learn that it had once been a site of intense conflict or was filled with landmines. Nothing in the landscape announced this directly – no markers or visible remains. That kind of knowledge changes how you inhabit a space- it heightens your awareness, but it also underscores how much remains unseen. That experience stayed with me because it shifted how I understood presence. That’s where my interest lies: in how history persists without declaring itself.
Jo Ractliffe, Video club, Roque Santeiro market from the series Terreno Ocupado, 2007. © Jo Ractliffe.
Throughout your work, there is a marked resistance to the certainty traditionally associated with documentary photography. Instead, the images seem to operate through ambiguity, distance, and suggestion. How do you think about the relationship between documentary, interpretation, and the limits of what photography can meaningfully reveal?
I think it started with people’s responses to my photographs. Early on, there was a disconnect between what I thought my pictures were doing and what others saw – or rather, didn’t see. I’ve also stood in places where I felt something profoundly significant was at stake, and yet when I looked at the photograph afterwards, it seemed almost mute. That gap between experience and image became important to me. It made me realise that photography doesn’t confirm meaning; it complicates it. So rather than trying to overcome that limitation, I’ve worked with it. The ambiguity, the distance, even the sense of failure – these are not problems to be solved but conditions to be acknowledged. And the viewer needs to enter that space of uncertainty as well.
I’ve always been wary of the authority that documentary photography can claim – the idea that the camera can fix meaning or provide clarity. My experience has been quite the opposite. The more I work, the more I’m aware of how partial and contingent any image is. Rather than trying to resolve that uncertainty, I’ve come to see it as a necessary condition. The photograph can suggest, it can point, it can hold a tension, but it cannot fully account for what it depicts. So the work often operates in that space between recognition and doubt. Interpretation becomes unavoidable; the viewer is implicated in the act of making meaning. In that sense, the limits of photography are not simply constraints, but also openings – ways of acknowledging what cannot be fully known or represented.
Jo Ractliffe, Crossroads, 1986. © Jo Ractliffe.
In projects such as ‘As Terras do Fim do Mundo’, the Angolan landscape becomes a complex terrain through which questions of war, memory, and displacement unfold. How did working in Angola reshape your understanding of how landscapes carry the afterlives of conflict?
Working in Angola was formative in that it confronted me with a landscape where the traces of conflict were both pervasive and, at times, barely perceptible. The scale of the terrain and the duration of the war meant that its aftereffects were unevenly distributed – some sites marked quite explicitly, others almost entirely absorbed back into the land. It required recalibrating how to look and how to move through such spaces. And the question of time, of whether I was looking at something recent or from decades past, threw everything out of kilter – that was a profound experience because I realised it also completely disassembled language. I became more attentive to fragility – to the possibility that what appears stable or benign may in fact be contingent or even dangerous.
In Angola, there were long stretches of travel where very little seemed to happen. Hours on the road, moving through vast expanses of land. But then there were moments that unsettled that sense of continuity. I remember driving with someone who had lived through the war, and he would occasionally point out places in passing – almost in an offhand way – where significant events had occurred. Without him, I would have missed them entirely. That reliance on mediated knowledge made me more aware of how limited my own perception was. The landscape doesn’t reveal itself equally to everyone; it requires translation, and even then, it remains partial.
So the project was shaped by this sense of dislocation, of being an outsider moving through a landscape that resists easy comprehension. That experience reinforced for me the idea that landscapes carry the afterlives of conflict in ways that are often resistant to narrative closure. Angola made that very clear to me.
Jo Ractliffe, Jo-Marie Robinson’s garden, Doringbaai from the series The Garden, 2025. © Jo Ractliffe.
Many of your photographs depict sites that might initially appear unremarkable: quiet stretches of land, roads, or infrastructures. Yet they often hold an unsettling charge once their historical contexts come into view. What draws you to these seemingly ordinary spaces as sites through which deeper historical narratives can surface?
Jo Ractliffe, Tundavala Gorge, Lubango from the series As Terras do Fim do Mundo, 2010. © Jo Ractliffe.
The so-called ordinariness of these spaces is precisely what draws me to them. There is a tendency to associate history with sites that are already marked, already monumentalised. But in many contexts, certainly as I have experienced them in southern Africa, history is embedded in places that do not announce themselves. A stretch of road, a fence line, a piece of infrastructure – these can all be implicated in larger systems of control, movement, or exclusion. By attending to these quieter sites, the work tries to unsettle assumptions about where history resides and how it becomes visible. The charge you mention often emerges slowly, and perhaps uneasily, as the viewer begins to sense that something is at stake in what initially appears unremarkable. These are not sites that announce themselves, and that’s precisely why they interest me. They require a slower kind of attention. Often, the significance only emerges later, sometimes even long after the photograph has been made.
Jo Ractliffe, Piet Basson’s bible, Riemvasmaak from the series The Borderlands, 2013. © Jo Ractliffe.
The notion of the ‘out of place’ suggests both geographical displacement and a disturbance in how a place is ordinarily understood. How does this idea resonate with your own experience of moving through and photographing landscapes marked by layered and often contested histories?
The idea of being ‘out of place’ resonates on several levels. For me, it speaks to a condition as much as a location. It names a state of being apart, where you and your forms of belonging are rendered provisional or misaligned with the spaces you inhabit. The title also reflects my own position as a photographer. I am often an outsider, very aware of the limits of my access and understanding. This sense of being ‘out of place’ shapes how I look, how I frame, and how I resist claims of authority.
But there is also a more conceptual dimension, where the place itself can seem unsettled; sites where the histories are so contested that they resist any stable reading. Many of the landscapes I’ve photographed are marked by layered histories that do not align neatly, with different narratives overlapping, and no single account feels sufficient. To work in such contexts is to accept a certain disorientation, to recognise that one’s own understanding will always be partial. This disorientation also has to become part of the work; it prevents a kind of certainty that I think is critical to examining such places and their larger contexts.
Jo Ractliffe, Seapoint, 1984. © Jo Ractliffe.
Across the exhibition, the act of looking feels deliberately slowed, inviting viewers to attend to the subtleties of light, texture, and absence. In an era defined by accelerated image circulation, what role can this slower, more contemplative form of photography still play?
Slowness has always been integral to how I work, both in the making of the images and in their encounter. My working process has always been quite slow, often involving repeated journeys and multiple returns to the same site. That slowness extends to how I hope the work is seen, experienced. It’s a way of resisting the impulse toward immediate legibility or consumption. I’m aware that we’re accustomed to scanning images quickly, but my pictures don’t lend themselves to that. They ask for a different tempo. I’ve had viewers tell me that they didn’t notice certain details until they spent time with the image – subtle shifts in light, small interruptions in the landscape. That kind of delayed recognition feels important. It mirrors, in some way, the process of making the work. In a moment where images circulate rapidly and are often encountered fleetingly, there is perhaps an even greater need for forms that ask something different of the viewer – time, patience, a willingness to remain with uncertainty. Photography can still offer that space. It can create a pause, a hesitation, where looking becomes more deliberate. That doesn’t necessarily resolve anything, but it allows for a different kind of engagement – one that acknowledges complexity rather than bypassing it.
Jo Ractliffe, Nadir 14, 1988. © Jo Ractliffe.
Your work has long engaged with Southern African landscapes as spaces where histories remain unresolved. Looking back across the trajectory of your practice, how has photography enabled you to think through these histories differently over time?
I think, were I not a photographer, my knowledge and understanding of our country’s history would be much reduced. Photography has enabled me to research, travel, and experience this country in a multidimensional way. And, importantly, having a camera facilitates encounters I probably would not have otherwise. It’s a real privilege and one that I am careful with. There are places I’ve returned to over many years, and each time they seem altered—not only because they may have physically changed, but because my own understanding has shifted. For example, my first pictures were taken along the West Coast, in Namaqualand and the Northern Cape. I returned to this landscape in 2022 after a long absence and have been working there ever since. One of the exhibition rooms contains photographs from there spanning forty years. Photography has allowed for that kind of return, that ongoing engagement. The work is a way of staying with these places, of sustaining a relationship to them and their histories.
This exhibition is on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris until 24 May 2026.
