Chapter 12 - Through the Lens: New Interpretations of the Photographic

PIETER HUGO Dayaba Usman with the Monkey Clear. Abuja, Nigeria. 2005
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
112 x 110 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© Pieter Hugo

“It was 1952 and the only black photographers I found in Johannesburg were street photographers who set up makeshift studios near bus terminals taking portraits of people with wooden, black-clothed cameras,” wrote photographer Jürgen Schadeberg in a foreword to The Fifties People of South Africa, Black Life: Politics Jazz Sport (1987).

The young photo journalist Schadeberg had arrived by ship from Germany the year before and had landed a job at The African Drum, a magazine for black readers. Schadeberg was the fourth member of staff.

His first trainee was the completely inexperienced seventeen-year-old Bob Gosani, who within a few years would become very well known as a photographer throughout Africa. Peter Magubane, initially hired as a driver, and others, like Ernest Cole, followed. Together the Drum reporters became known not only for their daring exposés of the apartheid regime but for their dictum—an oft-cited, somewhat cliché saying: Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.

The 1950s marked Drum’s heyday. Under publisher Jim Bailey, thousands of photographs were taken recording political actions such as the forced removals of black people from Sophiatown, Johannesburg, under the Nationalist government’s harsh new policies, the appalling labor conditions on white farms, the bleak conditions in the mines. But the Drum also recorded the beauty queens posing in swimsuits on mine dumps, the frenetic atmosphere of the jazz clubs, and the busy social life of Johannesburg at a time when apartheid had not yet split the races almost completely apart. We see Nelson Mandela as a keen amateur boxer in a roof top sparring session or arriving at court by bus as a defendant in the 1958 treason trial. These photos are stored in Bailey’s African History Archives in Johannesburg and constitute an invaluable historical record of the era.

The Drum photos set the scene for the tradition of confrontational documentary photography, which would live on through the apartheid years, sending images of conflict and violence in South Africa to the rest of the world. Magubane became one of the country’s most famous photographers, and he has published a number of books of collections of his photographs, such as June 16: The Fruit of Fear (1998), which presented Magubane’s photographs taken in Soweto at the time of police resistance to protests by students.

Beginning his career as a photographer at about the same time as Magubane, veteran photographer David Goldblatt has also had a most illustrious career, providing an invaluable and unequaled record of the social history of South Africa through his images of its people and places.

Of the photographers whose work is covered in this chapter, only Guy Tillim has a background of documentary photography under apartheid, starting to work as a professional freelancer in the mid-1980s with Afrapix, a collective of South African photographers. His most recent series, “Avenue Patrice Lumumba” (2008), took the photographer to towns and cities across Mozambique, Angola, and Congo, recording what might be seen as the failure of the modernist city in Africa: once handsome buildings drab from lack of paint, government offices with broken desks, and hopelessly antiquated equipment.

But perhaps there is more to be read in these photographs than the surface dereliction. “Africa as a name, as an idea, and as an object of academic and public discourse has been, and remains, fraught,” wrote Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe of WISER, the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, in the journal published by the Public Culture Society for Transnational Cultural Studies. They continued, “The obstinacy with which scholars in particular (including African scholars) continue to describe Africa as an object apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete example of something else, perpetually underplays the embeddedness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually speaks.

“There are many explanations for the failure of contemporary scholarship to describe the novelty and originality of this continent in all its complexity, to pay sufficient attention to that which is unknown about it, or to find order in the apparent mess of its past and the chaos of its present. It suffices to mention a few. First is the fact that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present (the creativity of practice) is always ahead of the knowledge produced about them.”

This more nuanced reading of images from Africa applies to Zwelethu Mthethwa’s photographs of strong sugarcane workers and knowing child gladiators, and Mikhael Subotzky’s prisoners in a Beaufort West jail, who have painted the wall of their exercise yard with the views of the landscape that they are prevented from enjoying. The cautionary note against a rush to judgment might also apply when looking at the photograph by Pieter Hugo, with what appears to be a burnt and violated youth by the side of the road, displaying the sort of excess that the world expects from Africa but is in fact a constructed image of an out-of-work actor playing a role of the kind popular in the Nollywood film industry.

The hip and assertively inventive youth of the city are the subjects of the photographs of Nontsikelelo Veleko, whose admiration for the verve of her contemporaries translates into asking them to pose for her ongoing series of street fashion images. The construction and deconstruction of identity is also the theme of the photographs of twins Hasan and Husain Essop, who examine aspects of their lives as young Muslims against the background of their home city of Cape Town, a highly desirable tourist destination, but at the same time a city with a deeply divided past.

Jo Ractliffe is known for her black-and-white photographs made with deliberately maltreated cameras to produce such images as the long striplike “Vlakplaas:2 July 1999 (drive-by shooting),” a mundane-looking image of a locale with a macabre history. Living the life of the nomadic contemporary artist, Bridget Baker constructs her narrative around the worldwide peregrinations of her alter-ego heroine, the Blue Collar Girl, whose challenge is always to find a way to carry out her self-imposed task wherever she finds herself.

By contrast, Lawrence Lemaoana, the last artist in this book, need move no farther than to his computer to digitally manipulate his colorful images of pink-clad rugby players into witty but pointed comments on gender and his own identity as a young black individual. On his use of the computer the artist says, “I move between the real world and super-real world where all that is within it is within my control.”

Working very differently from one another, then, each of these artists uses photography to pursue an individual line of artistic investigation, not attempting to provide neat answers but rather to open up some avenues for contemplation with images that challenge us to look past a first response.

David Goldblatt
“Saturday Morning at the Hypermarket:
Semi-final of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition, 28 June 1980”
Silver gelatin print on fiber paper
© David Goldblatt