Christopher Sibidla was burnt to death in Pollsmoor Prison in 2004. Shortly after his death, I went to see Chris’ parents to ask for permission to photograph his funeral. After agreeing, his mother asked me to take his younger brother to the mortuary to complete the administrative formalities. She also asked me to take a photograph of Chris’ body.

This was ten years after democracy in South Africa, at a time when service delivery protests, the HIV pandemic, high crime rates, and rising social tensions all contributed to a sense of friction and disorder in my country of birth. Coincidently, it was also the year that my family fell apart, our previously “happy”, “lefty”, middle-class existence sheared through by affairs, illness, violence and abuse.

I went to the mortuary and, having never seen a dead body before, took the photograph. After printing it, I agonized over whether to take such a violent image back to Chris’ mother. I could hardly look at the image, but she took one look at my print, kissed its surface and pushed it to her chest, thanking me for helping her to put her son to rest.

The image haunted me for years and I had a strange but strong instinct that I wanted to smash it. This felt like a very scary, violent thing to do, in some ways re-enacting the violence done to Chris. But I soon realized that conversely, in smashing the glass, I was also covering up the burnt nakedness of his body. I was retrospectively writing my own feelings of violence, trauma and fear that came from both my experience of taking the photograph and my ambivalence at the representation I had made, back into the photographic object itself. Those feelings of mine had been left out of the “neatness” of the story where the mother thanked me for the image and the lessons that I had supposedly learnt from her very different reaction to the photograph.

In thinking about this gesture further, Barthes’ theory of punctum came to mind. I had always loved this description of the subtle, obscured and implied element of the photograph that could “puncture” the surface and reach out to grab the viewer emotionally. I hoped that my best photographs had this quality, but then also grew frustrated with the way that my large prints could still be “consumed” for their formal qualities. In ignoring Barthes’ nuance and taking this “puncture” literally to the point of smashing the surface, I felt that I was drawing attention to the photographic surface itself as an intermediary between the representational world of the subject and the physical world of the viewer, and thus reminding the viewer of what they are looking at in objective terms. I was hoping to make it impossible for them to be complacent either with the images’ or their own subjectivity.

Through smashing this and other photographs, my relationship to photography has fundamentally changed, as well as my ability to relate the pain of others to the pain I feel in myself.