Two Men Arrive in a Village

Photographs by Jo Ractliffe with a Story by Zadie Smith

By Zadie Smith, Jo Ractliffe

2021

First Published

2.71

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H47M

Audio Length

Two Men Arrive in a Village, volume five of The Gould Collection pairs forty-nine photographs by South African photographer Jo Ractliffe with British writer Zadie Smith’s story Two Men Arrive in a Village. The selection of photographs by Jo Ractliffe in this volume were made between 1985 and 2019, and come from many South Africa, from the Great Karoo to Gauteng and Limpopo provinces to Zimbabwe in the north, and from the Western Cape, up the coast to Namibia and Angola. The dialogue between Ractliffe’s images and Zadie Smith’s parable is simultaneously a forthright and subtle commentary on injustice and imbalances of power. Together, they work to displace familiar narratives of violence and unsettle clichéd depictions of Africa in favor of a more nuanced interplay between the real and allegorical. The Gould Collection is a series of books that was created to honor the memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of forty-five. Over the past five years, since its inception, The Gould Collection editors have brought together a diverse group of photographers and writers from around the world. A shared thematic sensibility underlies the editors’ selection of the photographer-writer pairings presented in each volume

Avg Rating

2.71

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Authors

Zadie Smith

Author · 26 books

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Visit www.zadiesmith.com for more information.

Jo Ractliffe

Author · 1 books