Defiant images. Photography and Apartheid South Africa
Darren Newbury. Unisa Press
Format
193 x 250 mm (Laminated softcover)
Pages
356
Published
November 2009
ISBN 13
978-1-86888-523-7
Unisa Press Item no 8137
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Subject: South Africa; photography; social documentary; politics; apartheid
“This book is much more than just a discourse on photography in the land of apartheid. And it goes
well beyond sophisticated debate on the artistic merits of images. While keeping the lens trained on
the evolution of photography it plunges the reader into a sharp and evocative socio-cultural history of a
country in deep conflict.” – Albie Sachs
Photography is often believed to 'witness' history or 'reflect' society, but such perspectives fail to
account for the complex ways in which photographs get made and seen, and the variety of motivations
and social and political factors that shape the vision of the world that photographs provide. Defiant
Images develops a critical historical method for engaging with photographs of South Africa during the
apartheid period. The author looks closely at the photographs in their original contexts and their
relationship to the politics of the time, listens to the voices of the photographers to try and understand
how they viewed the work they were doing, and examines the place of photography in a postapartheid era.
Based on interviews with photographers, editors and curators, and through the analysis of
photographs held in collections and displayed in museums, Defiant Images addresses the significance
of photography in South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century
Contents
Foreword
vii
Acknowledgements
xi
List of figures
xv
Introduction
1
1
An African Pageant: Between Native Studies and Social Documentary
15
2
‘A Fine Thing’: The African Drum
3
‘Johannesburg Lunch-hour’: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision
of Drum
113
4
An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage
173
5
An Aesthetic of Fists and Flags: Struggle Photography
219
6
‘Lest We Forget’: Photography and the Presentation of History in the
Post-apartheid Museum
271
81
Epilogue
317
Select Bibliography
323
Introduction 1
Index
332
About the author
Darren Newbury is Professor of Photography at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham
City University. He studied photography and cultural studies at undergraduate and postgraduate
level, and completed his PhD in 1995. His research interests are in photography, photographic
education and visual research methods. He has published in journals including: Disability and Society;
Journal of Art and Design Education; Journalism Studies, Visual Anthropology; British Journal of
Sociology of Education; The Curriculum Journal; Visual Anthropology Review, Visual Communication,
Visual Culture in Britain, Visual Studies. He is also current editor of the international journal Visual
Studies (since 2003). His book on photography in apartheid South Africa has involved fieldwork,
interviews and archival research in South Africa, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the
United States, and has been supported by two awards from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council.
He has served as an AHRC Peer Review College member, Postgraduate Panel member and convener,
and Postgraduate Committee member. He has also been involved in the development of doctoral
education and training in art and design since the mid 1990s.
Other recent and forthcoming publications
Picturing an ‘ordinary atrocity’: photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March, 1960. In
Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis. Edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy
Miller and Jay Prosser. Reaktion Books, London. Forthcoming 2010.
Living historically through photographs in post-apartheid South Africa: reflections on Kliptown
Museum, Soweto. In preparation for: Curating Difficult Knowledge. Publication planned for 2010.
Image, theory, practice: reflections on the past, present and future of photographic education.
Photographies Vol.2 No.2, 2009, pp.117-24.
‘Lest we forget’: photography and the presentation of history at the Apartheid Museum, Gold Reef
City and the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto. Visual Communication Vol.4 No.3, 2005, pp.259295.
Documentary practices and working-class culture: an interview with Murray Martin (Amber Films and
Side Photographic Gallery). Visual Studies Vol.17 No.2, 2002, pp.113-128.
Telling stories about photography: the language and imagery of class in the work of Humphrey
Spender and Paul Reas. Visual Culture in Britain Vol.2 No.2, 2001, pp.69-88. Reprinted in Peter
Hamilton (ed.), Visual Research Methods, Volume 2, London: Sage, 2006, pp.295-320.
Contact the author
Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University, Gosta Green, Birmingham, B4
7DX, United Kingdom. Email: darren.newbury@bcu.ac.uk
BOOK EXTRACT: DEFIANT IMAGES
Introduction
At a seminar on ‘Photography, Politics and Ethics’, in Johannesburg, 2004, 1 Susan Sontag talked
about being struck, on what was her first visit to South Africa, by the strong moral and ethical
Introduction 2
dimension within South African photography, and the attention given to the politics of photographic
representation. It was an observation that resonated with my own experience, like Sontag an outsider,
when visiting the country for the first time just two years previously. The power of photography as a
means of documenting reality or showing the truth about society, 2 which was exploited most
compellingly during the apartheid period, remained central to debates about the medium ten years
after the first democratic elections. Unlike Europe and the United States of America (US), where
during the 1970s and 1980s documentary photography had been ‘problematised almost to the point of
paralysis’,3 in South Africa there persisted a strong sense of its value as a means of commenting on
issues of social and political importance within a visual public sphere. At the same time, the charge of
naïve and uncritical humanism that had been levelled at documentary photography elsewhere did not
apply.4 There could hardly be a society in which the politics of making and showing images was more
apparent. The debates about representation and photographic truth were sophisticated and the
photographers articulate. I was left with the sense that South African documentary could not be fitted
easily into histories of photography written, as they largely have been, from the point of view of Europe
and the US. My desire to understand the complex relationship between photography and the social
and political context as it had developed during the apartheid period brought me back to South Africa.
This book is the result.
Recent years have seen a substantial critical and curatorial interest in African photography from both
the colonial and postcolonial periods. A series of major international exhibitions from the early 1990s
onwards launched African photography on the world stage and attracted a great deal of critical
attention, as well as generating an increase in the popularity of African photography amongst an
international gallery visiting public.5 But the position of South African documentary photojournalism in
this emerging discourse on ‘African’ photography is not straightforward. Whilst South Africa is well
represented in surveys of twentieth century photography, such as Revue Noire’s hugely significant
Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography,6 theoretical efforts to define an African
photographic aesthetic have tended to be more exclusive in their approach. Two exhibitions have
been particularly influential, establishing a lineage for African photography and framing its
interpretation within an international cultural arena: the 1996 Guggenheim exhibition In/Sight: African
Photographers 1940 to the Present (curated by Clare Bell, Okwui Enwezor, Danielle Tilkin and
Octavio Zaya); and ten years later, Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African
Photography (curated by Enwezor and exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New
York). Accompanying catalogue essays by Enwezor situate African photography within a postcolonial
theoretical framework. In the first of these, Enwezor offers a sensitive and sympathetic reading of the
photojournalism in Drum,7 referring to Jürgen Schadeberg’s ‘sharp clarity and great compositional
skill’, Peter Magubane’s ‘intimate humanism’, and the insights the magazine provides into the popular
culture and everyday life of 1950s South Africa and the ‘disparate African subjectivities that existed
apart from the constructs of the colonial enterprise’. 8 Yet, the argument is distorted by the need to
discern an essentially African style or quality. The photographers are described as ‘defying the
conventions of traditional documentary’9 when it would be more realistic to argue that they were in the
Introduction 3
process of establishing these conventions in a South African setting; the documentary paradigm in
South Africa, it seems, is compromised by its close association with photographic practices imported
from Europe and the US. And documentary’s significance is closely tied to historical events – ‘an
eyewitness to those events defining the course of South Africa’s political and social landscape’ 10 –
setting limits on its ability to transcend the context of apartheid. Despite concluding with the idea that
this work ‘opens up routes to many discourses’, 11 Enwezor draws no line forward from the work of
Drum in his later writings.
The documentary tradition, which provided a ‘tent pole of mid-century African modernism’ in the earlier
exhibition,12 subsequently disappears from view. For those African photographers considered to be
working in a documentary photojournalist tradition, the later rhetoric emphasises their escape from,
rather than their development of, this tradition, which appears only as a force for ‘Afro-pessimism’.13
Documentary photography is qualified as either ‘straight’ or ‘Western’ and where it is discussed at all,
seems to provide the antithesis of a genuinely African photography. African agency is only possible, it
seems, by marking a distinction from the documentary tradition, never within it. South African
documentary photography and photojournalism are relegated to a footnote in history and appear
bounded both historically and geographically by apartheid: ‘Because of the depredations of apartheid,
the documentary style became the dominant photographic genre in South Africa. Photography was
consistently used in the service of news reportage and in the ideological struggle between the
apartheid state and its opponents’.14 In/Sight appears in retrospect to have been an obituary for the
documentary tradition in Africa.15
Postcolonial writers on African photography have looked elsewhere to ‘rediscover’ African agency. 16
Central to the argument is the priority given to the West African portrait photography produced during
the 1940s and 1950s, specifically the paradigm examples of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé from
Mali, who in a series of stunning images dramatised the ‘burgeoning and self-conscious modernity’17
of an urban African population on the cusp of decolonisation. The theoretical and historical weight
these images are asked to carry is their embodiment of the distinction between colonial photography
and postcolonial African photography: ‘Most modern African portrait photography constitutes an
attempt at straightforward depiction of a social self, more specifically, the African self. In these
portraits, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the point of view is always direct and always
centred on the subject, unlike colonial photography, which usually imaged the African subject as a
specimen of some exotic investigation’. 18 In short, Enwezor argues, ‘to look at Keïta’s portraits of the
urban inhabitants of Bamako is to witness the near disappearance of colonial subjectivity’.19 Olu
Oguibe, writing in the catalogue for Flash Afrique (2001), makes essentially the same point when he
states that, ‘the ritual of self-imagining would become the singular, most important sustaining
framework for photography in Africa’.20 For both writers vernacular portraiture is synonymous with
African agency.21
Introduction 4
The African portrait tradition is clearly important, but its dominance within postcolonial photographic
theory threatens to obscure or devalue a broader understanding of photography in Africa, and
particularly South Africa where documentary photojournalism has been, and remains, so important.
The discovery of agency in vernacular modernist photographic practices has been the leitmotif of
postcolonial photographic theory. However, in combination with a search for the ‘authentically African’,
it has served to position the documentary tradition, with its inevitable association with the West,
outside of the frame of recent scholarship.22 It is this critical lacuna that I intend to address in this
book. Departing from recent writing about photography on the continent of Africa, I want to reconsider
the documentary tradition in South Africa, not as an authentically African tradition, whatever that may
mean, but rather as a complex set of photographic ideas and practices that were self-consciously both
modern and international, and yet at the same time thoroughly South African. 23
At the centre of this book is the ambition to understand how and why documentary photography
developed in the way that it did within apartheid South Africa. The extent to which the fact of apartheid
shaped the possibilities for photographic practice during this period renders any attempt to construct a
history of South African photography divorced from this context beside the point. William Beinart’s
argument that ‘apartheid became so dominant a feature of life over the next forty years [from 1948]
that it must be intrinsic to a description and understanding of this period’ applies equally to
photography and visual culture in South Africa as it does to society and politics.24
The narrow election victory of D. F. Malan’s National Party (NP) in May 1948 represented the
beginning of the apartheid period. Of course South Africa was far from an equal society before 1948.
A more thorough historical account would consider exploitation and oppression during the earlier
colonial periods, and in the Union of South Africa established in 1910, not least the Native Land Act
(1913), which consolidated a deeply iniquitous division of land ownership to the benefit of the white
settler population. Nevertheless, the Nationalists were ‘more determined and more confident of state
power than most of their predecessors’;25 they established ‘a more intense system’ of segregation and
‘enshrined racial distinctions at the heart of [their] legislative programme’;26 ‘half a century of
oppression and confusion began’.27 The NP quickly enacted the key pieces of legislation that would
form the architecture of the apartheid state. The Population Registration Act (1950) and the Group
Areas Act (1950) were centrepieces in this programme. The former put in place the notorious ‘pass
laws’, racial classification became compulsory, and documents stating an individual’s racial group
were issued. The Race Classification Board was set up to adjudicate disputes. The Group Areas Act
(1950) along with the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (1951) facilitated the work of apartheid
planners in creating separate racial zones to control the movement and residence of the population.
This led to the forced removal of black, Indian and coloured people from city centres, and the redesignation of areas as ‘white’.28 Residents of Sophiatown, the Johannesburg suburb immortalised in
the writing and photography of Drum as the vibrant centre of African intellectual and cultural life, were
subject to forced removal; the area became a white suburb renamed Triomf. The population of District
Six, a central area of Cape Town and now the subject of an important post-apartheid museum, was
Introduction 5
similarly displaced, although in this case the area remained largely unoccupied more than ten years
after the first democratic elections. The Bantu Education Act (1953) saw central state control of African
education. The mission schools, with their ‘emphasis on English and dangerous liberal ideas’29 were
replaced with a poorly funded technical education, using African vernacular languages at the lower
levels with a mix of Afrikaans and English at the higher levels. The underlying aim of the system was
‘retribalization’ and the production of ‘a cheap but not entirely illiterate labour force’. 30 The government
used the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) widely to restrict political organisation on the part of
Africans and to disrupt and ban the activities of the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan
Africanist Congress (PAC) as well as the South African Communist Party (SACP). Apartheid
legislation also reached into the personal lives of South Africans with the Mixed Marriages Act (1949)
and Immorality Act (1950) making sex and marriage between individuals of different racial groups
illegal, and expressing the fear of miscegenation and the symbolic threat it presented to the ideology
of purity that informed the Afrikaner state. And in acts such as the Reservation of Separate Amenities
Act (1953) ‘petty apartheid’ legislation created some of the most obvious and visible signs of apartheid
in the daily lives of the South African population; signs which would become ‘a favoured target of
opposition cartoonists and foreign photographers’,31 and provided a visual shorthand for apartheid.
To set against the implementation of increasingly oppressive legislation, it is possible to draw a picture
of resistance: the ANC Defiance Campaign of the early 1950s, a collective, non-violent response to
the passing of unjust laws; the adoption of the Freedom Charter by the Congress of the People at a
mass meeting in Johannesburg in 1955; the anti-pass campaigns, one of which, supported by the
PAC, in March 1960 led to the Sharpeville Massacre, and the increasingly brutal oppression of black
political activity that followed; the setting up of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK),
under Nelson Mandela’s leadership and the subsequent exile and imprisonment of many in the
leadership of both the ANC and PAC; the Black Consciousness Movement; and the Soweto Uprising
against the increasing use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools.
The photography that emerged from South Africa during this period was interwoven with these events
and this history. It cannot be defined solely in terms of the political context, but neither can it be
separated from it. The photographers somehow had to position themselves in relation to the central
fact of apartheid. Photography provided a means of recording some of the key events of the apartheid
period – the Defiance Campaign, the Treason Trial, the Sharpeville Massacre, the Soweto Uprising –
all of which provided material for photographic work and that now forms the archive on which many
contemporary museums displays draw. The representation of black politics was relatively new in the
1950s: when Jürgen Schadeberg photographed at the ANC conference in Bloemfontein in December
1951, he was the only photojournalist to do so. 32 Equally important are the ways in which the practice
of photography interacted with the apartheid system. Many of the stories that the photographers
recount from this period involve negotiating the terrain of apartheid. The encounter Schadeberg
recalled of being arrested under the Immorality Act whilst photographing Dolly Rathebe for the cover
of Drum dramatised one instance of the constant negotiation with the social and political environment
Introduction 6
that being a photographer demanded. Other photographers tell stories of cameras concealed in milk
cartons or loaves of bread. At times photography served a more active stance, becoming a means of
resistance, a site of struggle. It was the black photographer Ernest Cole’s manipulation of the racial
classification system in order to get himself reclassified as ‘coloured’ that facilitated his classic
photographic indictment of apartheid, House of Bondage;33 and the pursuit of this project that made
his departure into exile inevitable. These many acts of defiance were part of the culture of South
African photography.
But photography was about more than the politics of apartheid. Whilst political events provided the key
landmarks of the period, South African society also experienced profound social change. The decades
prior to the advent of apartheid saw a rapidly growing permanent urban black population, establishing
itself alongside older patterns of migrant labour. Between 1936 and 1948 the black population of
Johannesburg nearly doubled in size.34 This new environment provided a rich mix of subject matter for
photographers. Urban poverty, the growth of informal squatter settlements, and the work of social
reformers all came under the scrutiny of the camera; so too did the black culture of the city, the
township streets, the illegal brewing of alcohol, gang culture and the various musicians, politicians and
sports figures who came to prominence. The early 1950s were a moment of intense black cultural
creativity, centred particularly on Johannesburg, and often likened to the Harlem Renaissance. In this
fertile environment, photography provided an eloquent medium with which to portray the social and
cultural landscape of urban black South Africa. Although, the first attempts to document urban black
existence were made by white photographers and sprung from a liberal-reformist ethos, it was to be
the social and cultural aspirations of middle and working class urban blacks forced to live cheek by
jowl in inner-city locations, such as Sophiatown, that did most to shape the black photography which
emerged in the early apartheid years. The combination of urban working class cultural resistance and
middle-class achievement gave a distinctive quality to Drum and its photography. It is impossible to
describe the photography of this period without reference to this self-confident modern urban
sensibility.
The apartheid system was undoubtedly oppressive and often brutal; it set the context in which
photographers worked, shaped much of the subject matter which they photographed, and often
restricted the images that could be shown. But its control was far from total. Despite the economic
injustice and political oppression of the apartheid period, black South Africa remained open to global
cultural influences;35 this was especially true during the early apartheid years, before Sharpeville.
Photography was a significant channel through which these influences arrived in South Africa; directly
in some cases, in the form of photographers and editors from Europe, but also indirectly as South
African photographers absorbed the visual culture of Europe and the US. Illustrated magazines, such
as Life and Picture Post, were familiar to many of the photographers, and Drum was shaped in their
image. It was also to the wider world that photographers looked for an audience for their work. It was
not by accident that Leon Levson’s major exhibition on the subject of black South Africa travelled first
to London; the journey had long been familiar to those petitioning the colonial power on behalf of black
Introduction 7
South Africans. Nor is it surprising that it was in New York, London and Paris, rather than
Johannesburg, that Cole found support for his book House of Bondage. Whilst the style of
documentary photography that emerged during the apartheid years has its own distinctive
characteristics, it can only be properly understood as part of an international photographic scene.
From the beginning, South African photography existed within a complex network of international
social, political and cultural relations.
The approach I have developed in order to do justice to the subject has entailed a number of
methodological commitments. Rather than treating the images as speaking for themselves, in either
an ideological or aesthetic sense, I have sought to reconstruct the context from which they emerged.
Through close attention to primary sources, I have attempted to trace the flow of ideas and images
across countries and continents. In some cases this has involved literally tracing an often fugitive trail
of evidence across the world, as well as within South Africa itself. In the case of Cole, for example, this
led simultaneously inward to the township of Mamelodi where he lived in the 1960s, and outward to
private and public collections in New York, London, Gothenburg and Amsterdam.
I have engaged predominantly with photographs made for dissemination in the public sphere, both
within South Africa and increasingly, towards the later years of apartheid, circulating internationally.
Some of the photographs have become familiar points of reference, for example, as icons of
resistance or as symbols of the depredations of the apartheid period. One of my primary sources of
evidence, therefore, has been the images as they were published or shown. Many of the photographs
have complex biographies, and I have attempted to follow their transition from first publication, for
example, as photo-essays in Drum, into archival collections, exhibitions and museum displays in the
post-apartheid era. I am concerned not so much with the single image, but the photo-essay, exhibition
or body of work; interrogating each for the intentions of the photographers or editors and their possible
meanings for their audience. I have studied the visual repertoires of photographic humanism and
struggle photography, and the compelling descriptions of South African society they have provided.
Wherever possible, I have paid close attention to the photographers themselves; what it was that they
felt they were doing and how they perceived the meaning of their work. The theme of photographic
creativity runs through the book. Photographers do not merely record, but rather construct an image of
society. I have therefore conducted interviews or exchanged correspondence with many of the
photographers discussed, as well as others who knew or worked with them. I hope the path I have
taken avoids the many pitfalls of naïve oral history – I do not consider photographers the final arbiters
on the meaning of their images – whilst at the same time keeping in mind that photographs are made
by photographers, and without them there would be no visual record to inspect.
The book is organised into six chapters. Although they are presented chronologically, I do not pretend
to offer a comprehensive survey of South African photography during the apartheid period. Instead,
my approach has been to discuss specific publications, organisations and photographers selectively.
Introduction 8
The material I have chosen conforms to three criteria. First, all of the examples have shaped the use
of photography as a creative visual medium. In other words, their significance is cultural as well as
social or political. Second, they have evolved not simply against the backdrop of apartheid, but also in
an international context; they cannot be understood apart from cultural exchanges between South
Africa and the rest of the world. Third, they have contributed to a public visual discourse about South
African society at critical points in its history. Specifically, I have chosen to focus on bodies of
photographic work that stood more or less self-consciously in opposition to apartheid; they are
examples of photography against apartheid. Whilst there is a convincing argument to be made that
since the 1940s the leading edge of photographic practice in South Africa has been aligned with
opposition to apartheid, readers should be aware that my selection of material is deliberate. There are
of course omissions. I have not discussed, except in passing, the role of the white illustrated press.
Nor have I paid much attention to vernacular photographic practices, which in their own way resisted
or provided refuge from the oppression of the apartheid state. I have focused predominantly on the
city, most often Johannesburg, and the townships, especially in the early years of apartheid. Quite
simply this is where much of the work took place. But there are no doubt other histories of
photography in South Africa during this period that could and should be written.
Although the NP did not come to power until 1948, I have taken the immediate post-war years as my
starting point (Chapter One). Apart from the fact that racial segregation itself has a long history, there
are two reasons for doing so. It was during this period that photography began to develop selfconsciously as a means of commenting on South African society. The Second World War had
propelled photographers such as Constance Stuart Larrabee into the public eye and the growth of the
illustrated press provided a locus for the production and dissemination of photographic essays.
Against a backdrop of rapid urbanisation, there emerged a social documentary photographic repertoire
for the description of urban black African society to sit alongside the dominant paradigm of ‘native
studies’, which until then had accounted for most photographs of black South Africans. The
photographers were exclusively white and their politics predominantly liberal and paternalist. However,
although somewhat hesitant and equivocal, in this period the first uses of photography as a means of
opposition to the policies of the South African government can be seen. Tracing the different
trajectories of Stuart Larrabee and Levson, both of whom were influenced by the growing status of
photography as an art form and sought international audiences for their work, I hope to offer an insight
into the articulation of photography, society and politics in post-war and early apartheid South Africa. If
it proved to be a false dawn for a critical documentary tradition, this period nevertheless represented
an important moment in the history of South African photography.
Drum has a somewhat mythical status in the history of South African photography; and from the mid1980s onwards there has been a substantial re-publication in book form of many of the images from
its first and most significant period (1951--1965), along with first-hand accounts by a number of its
photographers and editors. However, there has yet to be a thorough critical and historical evaluation of
this work. Drum photography has become synonymous with urban black South Africa in the 1950s.
Introduction 9
Although in its first incarnation it drew on a somewhat limited repertoire for the visual depiction of black
life, before long it gave rise to a new photography quite unlike anything South Africa had seen before.
Looking first at its launch as The African Drum (Chapter Two) and the shape it subsequently took as it
sought to appeal to an urban black readership (Chapter Three), I follow the development of Drum
photography during a period of remarkable creative intensity. On one level, the documentary
photography associated with Drum can be viewed as a cultural import from Europe and the US. Drum
was one of the main publications providing a vehicle for the expression of an international humanist
style and philosophy of photography in South African visual culture. However, I hope to demonstrate
why this explanation is too simple. Drum was crucial to the development of black photojournalism in
South Africa, providing a training ground, and connecting photographers such as Peter Magubane,
Bob Gosani and Alf Kumalo to the international world of photojournalism.
If the Drum era was distinguished by a sense of optimism and creative possibility, then the Sharpeville
Massacre in March 1960 brought it to an abrupt end, ushering in an increasingly hostile climate for
photographers. The 1960s were a difficult time for photography. By the end of the decade
opportunities for publication were severely restricted and photographers found themselves
increasingly subject to restrictions, state violence and oppression. Amongst them was Ernest Cole
whose life and work is symbolic of the fate of humanist documentary photography in this bleak period
in South African history. Although he worked for a brief while at Drum, his most significant work was
completed alone and had to be smuggled out of the country before it could be seen. In 1966 he went
into exile in the US to publish House of Bondage, a damning photographic critique of apartheid, which
was both more comprehensive and systematic than any of the work that had been published
previously. The book was banned in South Africa, but despite its scarcity became a key point of
reference for subsequent anti-apartheid photographers. In Chapter Four, I examine the complex
history of Cole’s book and how it can be read as a response to both the mundane brutality of apartheid
and the limits of photographic humanism.
Following a barren spell for political and cultural opposition to apartheid, the late 1970s and 1980s saw
a resurgence and the development of a more politically focused collective photographic practice
(Chapter Five). Associated particularly with Afrapix, an anti-apartheid photographic collective and
picture agency, the emphasis in the 1980s was on a collective rather than individual practice. There
was a self-conscious shift away from valuing the individual vision and creativity of the photographer, to
asking how photography could be used as a tool of the struggle for liberation and democracy.
Although some may have been ambivalent or even hostile to the title, this is often framed as ‘struggle
photography’, where creativity was subservient to the needs of the liberation movement. As with
Drum, though more explicitly, the emphasis on training black South African photographers was an
important part of this practice. I also examine here the work of Eli Weinberg, a trade union activist
photographing from the 1950s, which provides one of the earliest examples of ‘struggle photography’
and a precursor to the activist photographic tradition of the 1980s. Following his death in 1981,
Weinberg’s archive was housed as part of the photographic collection of the London-based, anti-
Introduction 10
apartheid International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), which was central to the international
distribution of images of the South African situation during the last years of apartheid, and has since
become one of the most significant post-apartheid collections.
The advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994 led to a re-appraisal of the role of photography; and,
some might argue, its creative release from the oppression and discipline of the apartheid period. But
this was also a moment when the images of the apartheid period began to be repositioned; often
literally as they returned from exile to archives and collections in South Africa. Photographic archives
were key repositories for imaging the past, and photographs taken for Drum or Afrapix became central
to many exhibitions, memorials and museum displays, commemorating the victims of the past and
presenting histories of the apartheid period. In 2001, for example, Cole’s House of Bondage was
installed as an exhibit at a major museum in Johannesburg. In Chapter Six, taking the Apartheid
Museum and the Hector Pieterson Museum as case studies, I consider this final transition, and the
ways in which these images have been re-used and re-interpreted in post-apartheid South Africa.
The new democratic South Africa provided a radically altered setting within which photographers had
to work. As Santu Mofokeng has suggested, this presented a challenge for those who photographed
during the apartheid years: ‘things have changed, it has become more difficult to legitimise my role as
a documentary photographer in the traditional sense. As I get more intimate with my subjects, I find I
cannot represent them in any meaningful way. I see my role becoming one of questioning rather than
documenting’.36 And increasingly there are photographers for whom the new South Africa is not new
at all, but the only South Africa they have known. Nevertheless, I believe this makes an understanding
of the documentary photography of the apartheid period more, rather than less, important.
In writing a history of photography during the apartheid period, I hope to inform debates about the
purpose and direction of photography in the present. Knowledge of the medium’s past is a necessary
condition for the development of a critical photographic practice, and can enable photographers,
editors and curators to see the continuities as well as the discontinuities with the present. But it is
more than that. Histories of photography have been dominated by examples from Europe and the US;
where photographic historians have looked to Africa they have been selective, often searching for
something essentially African. This book is not offered as some ‘other’ history of photography. The
photography that developed in the unique circumstances of South Africa during the apartheid period
deserves to be better known, its richness and sophistication more widely appreciated. Taken as a
whole it offers a fascinating microcosm for examining the complex interrelationship between
photography, society and politics, which remains central to any interpretation of the documentary
image.
There are moments in research when one is brought up short, moments when some incident or
observation throws into sharp relief the whole of one’s investigation. I want to end this introduction with
one such moment. In March 2004, I travelled to the township of Mamelodi on the eastern edge of
Introduction 11
Pretoria in Gauteng, where Cole had lived in the 1960s. I had gone there to interview Geoff Mphakati,
a close friend of Cole’s. We were discussing Cole’s book House of Bondage, when Geoff turned to me
and asked what I saw when I came into the township, and what I saw in the other townships I had
been through in South Africa. This reversal of the interview caught me by surprise, and my stuttered
response, that I saw people living in difficult circumstances, seemed to both of us completely
inadequate. The brief exchange exposed my position as an outsider, a white European researcher
trying to make sense of images of the black townships of apartheid South Africa, and seemed to throw
into doubt the very basis of such a project. Yet, on reflection, the question – ‘What do you see?’ – is
significant in another sense. I was there because Cole had made the photographs he did, because in
other words, he was compelled to show to others, in Europe and the US as well as South Africa, what
he saw. It was this ‘invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn’ 37 that had brought me to South Africa,
and this invitation to a dialogue about the world that is at the heart of documentary photography. In the
pages that follow, I hope to do justice to the complex political, practical, ethical and aesthetic issues to
which this simple question gives rise.
1
‘Photography, Politics and Ethics’, University of the Witwatersrand, 12 March 2004.
2
Patricia Hayes used the phrase ‘agendas of visibility’. See P. Hayes, ‘Power, Secrecy, Proximity: A
History of South African Photography’, in Zeitgenössiche Fotokunst Aus Südafrika (Contemporary Art
Photography from South Africa), ed. A. Tolnay (Heidelberg: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein und Edition
Braus im Wachter Verlag GmbH, 2007).
3
I. Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Inter-War Paris
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 4.
4
Roland Barthes’ damning critique of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition provides the
paradigm example. See R. Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973), 109. I have always been
dissatisfied with those critiques of documentary that seemed to argue that the supposedly ‘straight’
photographic image was inevitably aligned with an uncritical stance and that only the constructed
image could serve a progressive political position. Such arguments draw on a partial reading of Walter
Benjamin’s 1931 essay ‘A small history of photography’. See W. Benjamin, ‘A Small History of
Photography’, in One Way Street and Other Writings (London: New Left Books, 1979), 240--57.
5
See, for example, O. Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African
Photography (New York and Göttingen: International Center for Photography and Steidl Publishers,
2006); C. Bell, O. Enwezor, D. Tilkin and O. Zaya, In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to the
Present, catalogue of exhibition held 24 May--29 September 1996, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
introduction by C. Bell and essays by O. Enwezor, O. Oguibe and O. Zaya (New York: Guggenheim
Museum, 1996); Revue Noire’s Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Paris: Revue
Noire, 1999); T. Mieβgang and B. Schröder, Flash Afrique: Fotografie aus Westafrika (Göttingen:
Steidl Verlag, 2001).
6
Revue Noire.
7
Drum, an illustrated magazine, was first published as The African Drum in Cape Town in March
1951.
Introduction 12
8
O. Enwezor, ‘A Critical Presence: Drum Magazine in Context’, in In/Sight: African Photographers
1940 to the Present, ed. C. Bell et al (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 182--90.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
V. Rocco, ‘After In/sight: Ten Years of Exhibiting Contemporary African Photography’, in Enwezor,
Snap Judgments, 350.
13
See, for example, Enwezor’s discussion of Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer prize-winning image of a
Sudanese child dying of hunger, Snap Judgments, 17--18.
14
Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 45.
15
Enwezor further elaborates this argument in Snap Judgments. Echoing the thesis advanced in
In/Sight, he suggests that ‘the paradigmatic shift from colonial and Western documentary photography
in Africa to modern and contemporary African photography is captured in the attempt by African
photographers and artists to re-establish the priority of an extant African visual archive’. But this
conflation of colonial photography and the documentary tradition is problematic, and nowhere more so
than in South Africa; see Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 28.
16
This approach offered a way out of the cul-de-sac which writing on colonial photography had
reached, within which photographs were simply the index of social forces, and neither the subject nor
the photographer had any agency within the photographic process.
17
Rocco, ‘After In/sight’, 350.
18
Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 25.
19
Ibid., 26. It may also be argued that the privileging of the portrait form in contemporary African
photography, and the relative lack of landscape photography, may itself be a legacy of colonialism.
20
It is perhaps ironic that the dramatic example which Oguibe used to frame his argument was that of
a migrant worker come to work in the mines in South Africa and wishing to send an image home to
show how well he is doing in the city; see O. Oguibe, ‘The Photographic Experience: Toward an
Understanding of Photography in Africa’, in Flash Afrique: Fotografie aus Westafrika, ed. T. Mieβgang
and B. Schröder (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2001), 117. The example comes from ‘Sizwe Bansi is
Dead’, a play by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, first performed at The Space in Cape
Town, 8 October 1972.
21
The valuing of vernacular photographic practices and the relationship between photography and
self-fashioning is not exclusive to Africa. Chris Pinney’s seminal study of Indian photography is
extremely important in this regard and forms part of the same postcolonial theoretical landscape as
studies of West African portrait photography. See C. Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian
Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). See also H. Behrend, ‘“I Am Like a Movie Star in My
Street”: Photographic Self-creation in Postcolonial Kenya’, in Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa, ed.
R. Werbner (London: Zed Books, 2002), 44--62.
22
There are some exceptions, such as Revue Noire’s more inclusive Anthology of African and Indian
Ocean Photography; nevertheless, the accompanying critical-historical writing is not extensive.
Introduction 13
23
This is not the place for a long discussion of South African national identity, but writing in the 1960s
Nat Nakasa offered a definition that carries the complexity and emphasis that I wish to invoke here:
‘Who are my people? I am supposed to be a Pondo, but I don’t even know the language of that tribe. I
was brought up in a Zulu-speaking home, my mother being a Zulu. Yet I can no longer think in Zulu
because that language cannot cope with the demands of our day. I could not, for instance, discuss
negritude in Zulu . . . I have never owned an assegai or any of the magnificent tribal shields . . . I am
more at home with an Afrikaner than with a West African. I am a South African . . . “My people” are
South Africans. Mine is the history of the Great Trek. Gandhi’s passive resistance in Johannesburg,
the wars of Atewayo and the dawn raids which gave us the treason trials in 1956. All these are South
African things. They are a part of me’, N. Nakasa cited in United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Apartheid, Its Effects on Education, Science, Culture and
Information (Paris: UNESCO, 1967), 180.
24
W. Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 144.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
F. Welsh, A History of South Africa (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 428.
28
In discussing South Africa under apartheid it is occasionally necessary to resort to the official racial
terminology used by the Nationalist government.
29
Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, 160.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., 152.
32
Anthony Sampson interviewed by Darren Newbury, Westbourne Grove, London, 19 December
2003.
33
E. Cole, House of Bondage (A Ridge Press Book, New York: Random House, 1967).
34
P. Bonner, ‘The Politics of Black Squatter Movements on the Rand, 1944--52’, Radical History
Review, 46--47 (1990b):92.
35
Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, 144--5.
36
S. Mofokeng, cited in O. Enwezor and O. Zaya, ‘Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of Disruption: History,
Culture, and Representation in the works of African photographers’, in In/Sight: African Photographers
1940 to the Present, ed. C. Bell et al (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 22.
37
S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 117.
Introduction 14