Michael Godby
Professor of History of Art
Department of Historical Studies
University of Cape Town
E-mail: mgodby@mweb.co.za
Abstract
Histories of Photography, in South Africa as elsewhere, are generally told through the sequence of photographic techniques, or through the career of major individual practitioners, or through the incidence of particular genres, for example ‘Street Photography'. These histories are illustrated by the selection of individual photographs taken, necessarily, out of whatever context they had once occupied. But photographs, whether made for private or public display, are very often arranged originally in sequences that profoundly affect their meaning. And in arranging their images for publication in book form, photographers have choices in the creation of distinct forms of narrative. The present paper looks at the choices made by two important photographers at distinct moments of the liberation struggle in preparing their photographs for publication with the obvious intention of focusing the attention of the world on conditions prevailing in South Africa .
Ernest Cole fled South Africa in 1967 at the age of 27 after a very short career photographing the conditions under which Black people were forced to live at the height of apartheid. Cole started his professional life working for the celebrated Drum magazine in Johannesburg , but in his later years in South Africa he appears to have been intent on collecting evidence for a major expose of apartheid. Certainly when he left the country he took a suitcase full of negatives with him. For Cole, as well as for any publisher, the first problem that presented itself was how to arrange this mass of images. Cole appears to have suggested that the images be arranged in sections – on the mines, on the notorious pass laws, on domestic service, on schools, hospitals, etc. Thus images were placed in discrete chapters – no matter when they were taken – and Thomas Flaherty was engaged to write texts that explained the conditions covered by each section.
Peter Magubane also started his professional career with Drum magazine but he remained involved in journalism until very recently. After a period of harassment and detention in solitary confinement, Magubane witnessed and recorded for the Rand Daily Mail the Soweto Uprisings of June 16 th 1976. Magubane's pictures were published across the world and perhaps were instrumental in focusing global attention on the South African situation. When he came to publish these images as a book, however, Magubane sought a structure that would integrate the uprising into the life of the Soweto community. Magubane refused the structure of chapters dealing with particular sites of oppression. Instead he devised the idea of recording a working day in Soweto from the first moment of waking through the afternoon – when the Uprising is imagined to have occurred – to the coming of night.
The effects of these two structures, and the reason for their selection by the two writers, are explored in this paper.