The Ghost Begins By Coming Back: Revenants and Returns in Maud Sulter's Photomontages

This essay was commissioned to accompany the exhibition of Maud Sulter’s Syrcas (1993) at Autograph-Association of Black Photographers in London in 2016. Syrcas addresses the presence of people of African descent in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s and highlights the missing histories of black people during the Holocaust. This visually dazzling series reflects on violence, persecution and genocide, the disappeared and the unseen, the longevity and complexity of cross-cultural contact between the global south and the global north. Sulter deploys photomontage, a visual form with avant-garde modernist precedents and acknowledged political purpose. In Syrcas European and African cultures collide. Images of African masks and art objects, with a preference for those used for initiation, for fertility, and in funerary and ancestral rites, are laid onto and beside a range of European pictures and photographs. These include the Alpine landscapes, paintings dating from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, photographic portraits, scraps of modern prints, slips of twentieth-century travel imagery, excerpted hands, devices and decorative motifs, all snipped out of textbooks, catalogues and magazines.