[Johanna Maria (Vos) deJongh]

Among the earliest known daguerreotypes made in South Africa, this remarkable picture also serves as visual testimony of the often-unsettling experience of what it was like to sit for the first photographic portraits. Johanna Maria deJongh—a precocious client of one a handful of daguerreotype operators working in Cape Town in 1846—appears both confrontational and aloof, confident and cautious. Her gaze is somewhat askew, and her hands are at odds with each other: one, steadied by the chair in which she sits, holds a handkerchief in a refined gesture; the other, in shadow or perhaps sheathed in a glove, is caught in a nervous fidget as she twiddles the end of her bonnet’s ribbon during the relatively long exposure time required by the daguerreotype process. The overall effect, abetted by the drawn curtain revealing a makeshift backdrop and make-believe library, is one of a coded message, a cipher from the past.



Indeed, much of Johanna deJong’s life remains a mystery. We know that she descended from some of the first Europeans to settle in Cape Town, and that her great grandfather, Michiel Bok, was an enslaved person. Her great uncle, Eerwarde (Reverend) Michiel Christian Vos, was known for his ministry to enslaved and native populations on the Cape. Johanna herself never left Cape Town, the city in which she was born and photographed, and where she is now preserved in this mesmerizing portrait.