| Sumario: | This paper presents a temporal and spatial 'sojourn' through a single photograph taken by Daniel Morolong in the 1960s on the beachside in East London, a port city located in the Eastern Cape. It depicts six subjects who re-enact the sixteenth-century Italian 'Neptune fountains', which included mythological figures such as the god of water, water nymphs, and satyrs. The figure of the satyr on the fountains alluded to the theatre genre of the satyr-play in antiquity, which often took place by the seashore. One of its key motifs was the satyrs' quest to navigate unfamiliar surroundings they encountered far from home. Morolong's photograph is a part of a series that were used by their subjects to make claims for belonging in the context of apartheid-era forced removals from the city. This essay considers how the photograph is a performance in a quest to return home precisely through the subjects' invocation of satyrs, and, in turn, it reflects on how the photograph as a technological medium that is marked by water in both literal and figurative ways, is too a 'satyrical' object.
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