Layers of History: Robin Bernstein’s South African Landscape Photography

Robin Bernstein’s first photography publication, Mapalakata, presents a compelling visual investigation into the layered histories of South Africa’s Mpumalanga province. The title, meaning “visitors” in Bapedi, alludes to the traders who traversed southern Africa prior to European colonisation, a linguistic anchor to the region’s complex past. Situated on the escarpment between Mozambique and Eswatini, where steep cliff faces drop away to the red earth of the lowlands, Bernstein’s work investigates how successive waves of occupation—from precolonial societies to modern industrial enterprises—have left physical and cultural traces across the landscape. Through photographs spanning from 2019 to 2025, the South African photographer examines how people living in these spaces move through a terrain perpetually reshaped by rival assertions to its resources and narratives.

A Area Shaped by Repeated Incursions

The Mpumalanga escarpment where Bernstein’s photographs are positioned embodies far more than a geographical boundary; it functions as a temporal threshold where the region’s troubled past is literally inscribed into the landscape. The collision between the fertile high country and the warm low-lying areas has historically functioned as a contested territory, a location where various communities have persistently tried to establish authority over the land and its resources. Popular narratives have flourished in this in-between zone, yet these accounts have been progressively displaced by more recent industrial histories. The uncovering of mineral wealth in the region ignited cycles of extraction and settlement that profoundly transformed the social and physical fabric of Mpumalanga, creating patterns of resource exploitation that continue to define the territory currently.

Today, the landscape bears the accumulated weight of these competing claims. Non-native tree plantations now blanket vast tracts of terrain, their geometric rows a stark contrast to the natural topography. Mills convert pine into paper whilst steam ascends into the air, a constant industrial presence. Below, in the valleys, gold mines continue their century-long assault on the earth, their machinery creating an unending metallic chorus. Yet beneath these contemporary layers lie remnants of precolonial societies—artefacts scattered across the terrain that bear witness to worlds that preceded European and industrial colonisation. These physical traces act as silent testimonies to erasure, offering Bernstein’s camera a means to interrogate how history is repeatedly reconstructed through occupation and resource extraction.

• Introduced tree plantations blanket the terrain in regular rows
• Gold mines have functioned continuously for more than one hundred years
• Precolonial artefacts are dispersed across the terrain as lost evidence
• Industrial mills steadily convert timber into pulp and paper

The Mapalakata Project: Recording Overlooked Narratives

Robin Bernstein’s debut publication, Mapalakata, takes its title from a Bapedi word signifying ‘visitors’—a term drawn from oral histories to depict eastern traders who traversed southern Africa long before European colonisation. This language selection is deliberate and profound, creating the conceptual framework through which Bernstein examines the region’s complex history. By drawing upon the language of indigenous peoples, the photographer foregrounds narratives that have been systematically marginalised by dominant historical accounts. The work functions as an act of recovery, working to recover the visibility of those whose stories have been concealed by later periods of occupation and resource extraction.

The project explores how consecutive waves of ‘visitors’ to the Mpumalanga landscape have consistently reimagined its history, each working to utilise the resources that lie beneath its surface. Rather than providing a conventional historical timeline, Bernstein’s photographs demonstrate how different eras have left behind tangible traces—vestiges of precolonial communities, colonial infrastructure, and industrial machinery—that sit uncomfortably in the present landscape. These transient marks become the main focus, allowing the image-maker to interrogate how place becomes rooted in the consciousness of those who inhabit it, and how conflicting demands for land and resources shape both the physical environment and collective memory.

From Merchants to Manufacturers

The escarpment region has experienced major changes in its relationship with human settlement and commercial extraction. Ancient trade routes once connected remote settlements through systems of trade and cross-cultural engagement. Yet this early trading systems gave way to the competition for mineral riches that would fundamentally reshape southern Africa. The unearthing of gold resources in the latter 1800s sparked an industrial expansion that replaced earlier forms of engagement with the land, introducing industrial equipment and extraction facilities that remain dominant in the landscape today.

Bernstein’s photographs record the material consequences of this historical progression. Where traders once traversed the landscape, industrial workers now work in mills and mines. The shift between transient commerce to permanent resource removal has left stratified remains visible across the terrain—old artefacts buried beneath newer infrastructure, precolonial fragments overlooked by contemporary industry. This accumulation of historical periods becomes the photographer’s primary subject, revealing how each era of settlement attempts to eliminate its predecessors whilst simultaneously creating marks that resist complete obliteration.

Tangible Artifacts and Ephemeral Traces

The Mpumalanga escarpment functions as an archaeological palimpsest, where multiple layers of human occupation have impressed themselves into the landscape. Bernstein’s body of photographic work excavates these accumulated histories, demonstrating how each era of settlement—from precolonial settlement through colonial advancement to industrial extraction—has deposited material evidence that endures despite deliberate attempts at erasure. The photographer documents not merely the major monuments of history, but the scattered artefacts that scatter the landscape: abandoned tools, decaying structures, and abandoned infrastructure that speak to lives and labour now largely lost. These transient remains become repositories of memory, resisting absorption into the stories of subsequent occupiers.

Current inhabitants of the region traverse this densely stratified landscape, where past and present exist together in uneasy proximity. Bernstein’s engagement with both the material surroundings and the people who inhabit it demonstrates how history is not just an abstract concept but a concrete presence that shapes daily existence. The industrial mills that define the valleys, the gold mines that have operated continuously for a century, and the plantations of non-native trees all constitute attempts to reconfigure the landscape according to market demands. Yet beneath this industrial veneer, the remnants of precolonial societies persist, fragmentary and excluded, presenting alternative narratives to those endorsed by capital and state power.

The Feral Horses of Kaapsehoop

Among the most striking remnants documented in Bernstein’s work are the untamed horses that traverse the highlands near Kaapsehoop. These animals embody a concrete connection to an preceding, unsuccessful gold rush that preceded the discovery of the Witwatersrand by a span of two decades. Speculation suggests they are offspring of horses deserted during this unsuccessful undertaking, their presence a living archive of financial ambition and commercial failure. Captured with distinctive closeness, the horses represent the endurance of the past—creatures that persist as unwitting testaments to the region’s turbulent transformation.

The wild horses function symbolically within Bernstein’s broader investigation of transience and occupation. They were never intended to remain; they were surplus to failed enterprise, abandoned when economic prospects collapsed. Yet they persisted, adapted, and became naturalised to the landscape, their presence now inseparable from Kaapsehoop’s identity. In this way, they mirror the broader theme animating Mapalakata: how histories that were meant to be erased resurface unexpectedly, how the traces of failed projects and forgotten peoples continue to haunt the present, resisting the clean narratives that successive waves of occupation attempt to impose.

Present-day Existence in Disputed Environments

Bernstein’s photographic practice extends beyond historical artefacts to document the lives of individuals living in these layered landscapes. In documenting people like Marycate and her daughter Sibahle in their grandmother’s home in the Emjindini location near Barberton, the photographer emphasises the human dimension of these conflicted spaces. These current photographs reveal how people navigate through the accumulated weight of conflicting pasts, inhabiting places that have been taken, left, and retaken repeatedly. The intimacy of Bernstein’s approach allows audiences to see not merely the tangible traces of historical transformation, but the everyday life of those whose presence constitutes the present moment.

Through these portraits, Mapalakata expresses a crucial insight: that grasping South Africa’s complex landscape demands consideration of the people who live there today, whose daily lives are deeply connected to the layers of geology and history beneath their feet. The work demonstrates how place takes root in consciousness through inhabitation, through the gathering of memories and experiences within defined spaces. By capturing present-day inhabitants alongside the remnants of previous occupations, Bernstein exposes how the past is not merely historical—it is actively at work, determining the conditions and prospects of present-day life in ways both apparent and concealed.

• Communities navigate layered histories whilst sustaining cultural identity and continuity
• Domestic spaces become repositories of endurance during industrial transformation
• Personal narratives ground place to lived experience outside colonial accounts

Photographs as Historical Evidence

Bernstein’s photographic approach functions as a intentional form of archival documentation, one that resists the removal endemic to South Africa’s disputed history. By focusing on both the physical remnants distributed across the Mpumalanga terrain and the inhabitants of these places, he creates a visual archive that resists the singular narratives established by repeated cycles of occupation. The photographs become testimonies to the continued presence of those whose pasts have been systematically obscured—from the societies before colonisation whose cultural objects lie buried beneath plantations and mines, to the contemporary communities whose daily existence constitutes an continued assertion to land. This visual testimony demands that viewers confront the complexity of South Africa’s complex spatial history.

The strength of Mapalakata resides in its resistance to depict history as settled. Instead, Bernstein’s images expose how the landscape itself bears witness to rival perspectives and contested narratives. The wild horses of Kaapsehoop, descendants of animals abandoned during a unsuccessful mining boom, exemplify this temporal accumulation—they are enduring testaments to ambitious undertakings and forgotten dreams. Similarly, the manufacturing facilities that now dominates the region—the paper mills and gold mines—represents more recent attempts to harness resources and establish control upon the land. Through photographic practice, Bernstein converts the landscape into a text that can be read for its accumulated meanings, where each stratum recounts a story of displacement, aspiration, and endurance.