as rifles to kill it. The black African who can be seen between them has no weapons and is not really involved in the enterprise. He is, no doubt, what is referred to as a 'boy' and is there to help on the hunting expedition by preparing meals or fetching the dead game. In the composition of her picture, Eva Leitolf exposes the social hierarchies. She shows us the predicament of the third man as he follows the goings-on with apparent indifference. If you look at other pictures in which whites, most of them Namibians of German descent, are depicted, you get the impression that they completely take for granted their presence in this country that has been domesticated according to their ideas. Their body language is self-assured and territorial. Their farmhouses and ranches are clearly delimited and defined. Their social interaction is determined by customs and rituals that originate from their German homeland and from which the black Namibians are excluded.
However, Eva Leitolf never exposes her protagonists to ridicule no matter how absurd some of their actions seem - for example, when we see a farmer and his wife getting dressed up to take part in a carnival procession, in front of their immaculately groomed house with a palm tree and a sunny blue sky in the background. She reveals contradictions by depicting the houses and the places associated with the whites as pieces of scenery that have been set up in an environment in which they are not authentic and never will be.
By contrast, the indigenous peoples we encounter, Hereros in the main, practise a lively culture of remembrance. Yet the spatial boundaries within which they move are not demarcated with the signs of ownership. In their rituals they make reference to German-Namibian history, to the war between the German colonial troops and the Hereros and Namas that almost wiped out both tribal peoples. Yet the performances of the Namibian oturupa depicted in the photographs have something helpless about them. They are half-serious, half-tragicomic. No whites take part in these performances and hardly any of them watch. German colonial rule came to an end long ago, during the First World War, and apartheid no longer exists today. Namibia is an independent country. However, true reconciliation and rapprochement has still not taken place to this day. The big ranches still belong - with only a very few exceptions - to white farmers, often of German descent. Farm labourers and domestic staff generally come from the black sections of the population. The wounds inflicted upon the Hereros and Namas a hundred years ago have still not healed. The German government only recently issued an official apology. Latent racism continues to shape social interaction.
Here, too, Eva Leitolf forgoes any obvious partisanship, as well as all superfluity and embellishment. She stylises neither the victim nor the perpetrator. She describes facts. Her pictures are laconic and it is therein that their narrative power lies. In 'Rostock Ritz' she develops a genre picture in Namibia in the form of a sketchbook that does not make any claim to be complete or definitive. Her images provide an opportunity to reflect and examine, but they do not force themselves upon the viewer and that is precisely why Eva Leitolf's photographs have such a lasting effect.
Dr Inka Graeve Ingelmann is the curator for photography and new media at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.
© Inka Graeve Ingelmann 2005