CONTENTS

Foreword

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

List of figures

xv

Introduction

An African Pageant: Between Native Studies and Social Documentary

15

A Fine Thing: The African Drum

81

Johannesburg Lunch-hour: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision

of Drum

113

An Unalterable Blackness: Ernest Coles House of Bondage

173

An Aesthetic of Fists and Flags: Struggle Photography

219

Lest We Forget: Photography and the Presentation of History in the

Post-apartheid Museum

271

Epilogue

317

Select Bibliography

323

Index

333

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
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 nave
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
Noires 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

Introduction

(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 Jrgen Schadebergs sharp clarity and great
compositional skill, Peter Magubanes 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
documentary9 when it would be more realistic to
argue that they were in the 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 documentarys significance is
closely tied to historical events an eyewitness to
those events defining the course of South Africas
political and social landscape10 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 Keta and
Malick Sidib from Mali, who in a series of
stunning images dramatised the burgeoning and

Introduction

self-conscious modernity17 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 Ketas 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
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 selfconsciously 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 Beinarts 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. Malans
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

Introduction

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 individuals
racial group were issued. The Race Classification
Board was set up to adjudicate disputes. The
Group Areas Act 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 re-designation
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 similarly displaced, although in
this case the area remains 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 ideas29 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

Introduction

draw a picture of resistance: the ANC Defiance

Campaign of the early 1950s, a collective, nonviolent 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
Mandelas 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
those events and that 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 museum displays draw. The
representation of black politics was relatively new
in the 1950s: when 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 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 Coles 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

Introduction

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 rose 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 liberalreformist 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 Levsons 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 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

Introduction

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 postapartheid 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 nave 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. 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

Introduction

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
self-consciously 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 mid-1980s onwards there has been a
substantial re-publication in book form of many
of the images from its first and most significant
period (19511965), 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. 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

Introduction

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 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 Coles 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

Introduction

the 1980s. Following his death in 1981, Weinbergs

archive was housed as part of the photographic
collection of the London-based, anti-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, Coles
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

10

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 mediums 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.

Introduction

There are moments in research when one is

brought up short, moments when some incident
or observation throws into sharp relief the
whole of ones 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 Pretoria in Gauteng, where
Cole had lived in the 1960s. I had gone there to
interview Geoff Mphakati, a close friend of Coles.
We were discussing Coles 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
Notes
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 Zeitgenssiche Fotokunst Aus
Sdafrika (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
Steichens 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

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 learn37 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.
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 Benjamins 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), 24057.
5 See, for example, O. Enwezor, Snap Judgments:
New Positions in Contemporary African Photography
(New York and Gttingen: 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 May29 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 Noires Anthology of African and
Indian Ocean Photography (Paris: Revue Noire,

11

Introduction

6
7

9
10
11
12

13

14
15

16

12

1999); T. Miegang and B. Schrder, Flash

Afrique: Fotografie aus Westafrika (Gttingen:
Steidl Verlag, 2001).
Revue Noire.
Drum, an illustrated magazine, was first
published as The African Drum in Cape Town in
March 1951.
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), 18290.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
V. Rocco, After In/sight: Ten Years of Exhibiting
Contemporary African Photography, in
Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 350.
See, for example, Enwezors discussion of Kevin
Carters Pulitzer prize-winning image of a
Sudanese child dying of hunger, Snap Judgments,
1718.
Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 45.
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.
This approach offered a way out of the cul-desac 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
18
19

20

21

22

23

Rocco, After In/sight, 350.

Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 25.
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.
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.
Miegang and B. Schrder (Gttingen: 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.
The valuing of vernacular photographic practices
and the relationship between photography and
self-fashioning is not exclusive to Africa. Chris
Pinneys 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), 4462.
There are some exceptions, such as Revue
Noires more inclusive Anthology of African and
Indian Ocean Photography; nevertheless, the
accompanying critical-historical writing is not
extensive.
This is not the place for a long discussion of South

Introduction

24
25
26

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 dont 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. Gandhis 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.
W. Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, 2nd
ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 144.
Ibid.
Ibid.

27
28

29
30
31
32

33
34

35
36

37

F. Welsh, A History of South Africa (London:

Harper Collins, 2000), 428.
In discussing South Africa under apartheid it
is occasionally necessary to resort to the official
racial terminology used by the National Party
government.
Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, 160.
Ibid.
Ibid., 152.
Anthony Sampson interviewed by Darren
Newbury, Westbourne Grove, London, 19
December 2003.
E. Cole, House of Bondage (A Ridge Press Book,
New York: Random House, 1967).
P. Bonner, The Politics of Black Squatter
Movements on the Rand, 194452, Radical
History Review, 4647 (1990b):92.
Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, 144
145.
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.
S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 117.

13