Usakos – Photographs Beyond Ruins. The Old Location Albums 1920s–1960s

The exhibition ‘Photographs Beyond Ruins’ focuses on a central Namibian town, Usakos. The town’s history is linked to the development of the South African railway system in Namibia, which brought remarkable prosperity to Usakos in the 1940s and 1950s but which caused a major socio-economic decline in the early 1960s. During this time, the South African apartheid administration decided to transform the town according to racial segregation and apartheid urban planning by moving the African population out of their residential area into newly built, racially and ethnically segregated townships which were situated on the town’s outskirts. This full-colour exhibition catalogue is a joint work by two historians (Giorgio Miescher and Lorena Rizzo), an exhibition curator (Tina Smith) and a photographer (Paul Grendon).