Late last week, Jonathan Worth, who runs Phonar[fo-'när],a free and open undergraduate photography class, at Coventry University, in the UK, asked a number of writers and photographers to put together a list of photo books that are “notable/ inspiring/ seminal/ provocative, in [their] narrative structure/approach or perhaps in [their] ‘discussion’ of narrative.” Many notables in the photo world responded, including Alec Soth, Gilles Peress, Joel Meyerowitz, Nathalie Belayche, Geoff Dyers, Wayne Ford, Stephen Mayes, Jeff, Brouws, and David Campbell. The results are fascinating. You can see their lists, here.
And, to save you the trouble of clicking through, here's mine. It's got a problem, however, one that I address below.
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American Photographs, Walker Evans.
Very probably the most influential of all photo books. Demonstrated that photographic narrative can be carried along by the sequencing of images and that meaning (elusive though it may be) can be produced by their cumulative weight. Can also be read as a road trip (it was actually the work of several).
The Americans, Robert Frank.
The impact of Walker Evans’ American Photographs can be felt on every page. Not coincidentally, Evans helped to secure the Guggenheim that put Frank on the road across America.
South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, David Goldblatt.
Anotherof Evans’ photographic off-spring. As in American Photographs, buildings outnumber people — decidedly so, in Goldblatt’s case. An implied, although not actual, road trip, through what was then the land of apartheid. The built environment and the sequence in which it is seen reveals the complexity of the nation’s character.
Paterson, George A. Tice.
Ticedoes for a small industrial city, in New Jersey, what Evans and Goldblatt did for entire countries. Carefully sequenced, plainspoken, large-format images led viewers through and into the city. Buildings dominate, but people and the natural environment insist on being part of this story of grit and endurance.
JazzLife, William Claxton.
The road trip that Robert Frank would have made if he’d been in love with jazz and the people that play it. A long, rich voyage of discovery, with photographic sequencing that evokes the rhythms of jazz.
House of Bondage, Earnest Cole.
Cole, who despite the name, was African, takes viewers on a journey into day-to-day reality of a South Africa shaped by apartheid. Anger informs, but never overwhelms, the images and text. The impact of the photos makes the words almost superfluous.
The Sound I Saw, Roy DeCarava.
DeCarava first invites viewers to share his vision and sensibility before leading them outward into an exploration of African-American life in New York, in the ‘50s and ‘60s. His photos convey meaning and emotion that is beyond words, much like the music — jazz — that informs DeCarava’s way of seeing.
Moving Spirit: Spirituality in South Africa, Paul Weinberg.
Another inward journey that eventually leads outward. Another implied, though not actual, road trip. An examination of the many, changing facets of South African spirituality — traditional, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu. A photographic style developed during the height of the struggle against apartheid turns to contemplative subjects with great effect.
Seconds of My Life, Jamel Shabazz.
Anexuberant, extroverted engagement with African-American popular culture in the post-Civil Rights era. Shabazz finds meaning in the faces, clothes, and postures of the men and women, boys and girls that he encounters, mostly on the street. Narrative is implied as styles and backgrounds change.
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I'm pretty happy with my list. It's not meant to be definitive. Instead, it's a list of books that I like a lot. I've spent a good deal of time looking at and thinking about them over the years. There is a problem with the list, however. There are no women photographers on it.
The absence of women reveals a blind spot in my view of photography. I can't believe that I left out, for instance, Cindy Sherman, who has spent much of her career exploring narratives of various sorts. I'd like to hear other suggestions -- women photographers who have used photo books to create narratives or to investigate their nature. If you have any, please leave a comment.
Back then, our interest had as much to do with the photographers' subject -- the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s notorious system of white supremacy -- as with the photographs that they made. Given the stakes involved in the battle and its resonance with America’s own history of racism and segregation, it’s no surprise that many Americans couldn’t look away. For many of us, South African photos were dispatches from a strangely familiar land.
Darkroom cover. Photo of Miriam Makeba by Jurgen Schadeberg.
Sixteen years after the fall of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic society, the American fascination with South Africa remains virtually undiminished, but the sense of political urgency is gone. While it’s a less exciting time, it’s also one that creates space to step back and take stock. Darkroom does just that.
According to Tosha Grantham, the exhibition’s curator and editor of the book, Darkroom aims to be "a brief survey of photography, photo-based installations, and video art made in South Africa since 1950." As far as I can tell, this is the first American attempt to take on such a daunting task. South African may be a relatively small country, but it’s nevertheless produced several distinct generations of fine photographers and visual artists, working in a variety of traditions. Deciding who to invite to the party and how to organize and interpret their photographic output presents challenges that Darkroom only partly overcomes.
There’s no complaining, however, about who’s included. The 18 artists and photographers are all well known internationally or ought to be. They represent a cross-section of practitioners -- young and old, black and white, male and female. Goldblatt and Mthethwa both make the cut, as do others who have long since established global reputations -- William Kentridge, Santu Mofokeng, Sue Williamson, Roger Ballen, and Ian Berry. (Williamson, Ballen, and Berry, while foreign-born, have lived and worked extensively in South Africa.)
David Goldblatt: Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1972. (Plate 20.) (Click directly on the image to see a larger version.)
Also included are photographers and artists whose work deserves wider recognition outside of South Africa. This group includes those who began their careers in the 1950s and ‘60s, such as Alf Kumalo, Jurgen Schadeberg, a German immigrant, and Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall, as well as others who are still in their thirties, for instance, Tracey Rose, Robin Rhode, and Nontsikelelo Veleko.
The book’s weaknesses have to do with exclusion, rather than inclusion -- the photographers and photographic movements that were left out. This isn’t fatal. There are still plenty of interesting things to look at. But it does prevent the book from being the representative survey that it aspires to be. The roots of this problem are both practical and theoretical.
First, over a third of the plates in the book (35 out of 110) are devoted to the work of just two men -- Goldblatt and Schadeberg. This is far too many, even for photographers of their undeniable stature. It gives their output undue weight and occupies space that would have been better used by opening the door to more photographers.
Second, the book misinterprets South African photography’s past and its present, constructing an implicit narrative of movement from documentary photography to fine art photography. The end of apartheid, writes Grantham, has allowed "documentary photography’s collective relevance" to be "overtaken by more individualistic and artistic aims." This storyline privileges art over documentary, a contestable perspective, to say the least. More importantly, it rests on a sharp, but unsustainable dichotomy between documentary practice, on the one hand, and art, on the other. I’ll return to these points later.
Jurgen Schadeberg: The Three Jazzolomos (Jacob "Mzala" Lepers, bass, Ben "Gwigwi" Mrwebi, alto, Sol "Beegeepee" Klaaste, piano), Johannesburg, 1953. (Plate 14.)
Whatever it’s weaknesses, Darkroom is full of photos that are wonderful to see. The deeply saturated full-length color portraits of urban Africans that Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall made in the 1960s and ‘70s will be a fascinating discovery, even for people who know something about South African photography. Jump forward 40 years, to Nontsikelelo Veleko’s street portraits of young Johannesburg hipsters (below), and see how both the subjects’ identities and the photographer’s style have become less local and more globalized.
Readers get a tantalizing, but far too brief glimpse of Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album series, in which he has rephotographed and reimagined nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studio portraits of the black middle class. They’ll also want to see more of Sue Williamson’s recent Better Lives project -- portraits of African immigrants to South Africa. It’s a sensitive and angry response to violent outbreaks of xenophobia within South Africa.
Goldblatt is the star of the show. The power and beauty of the images that he has created over a long career have made him the best known and most influential of all South African photographers. His images manage to be simultaneously subtle and direct, earnest and ironic. "Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1972." is an example (above). This wonderfully complex photograph was made at a time when apartheid seemed to be unshakable. The photo contains the expected -- a uniformed cop and a threatening German shepherd -- and the unexpected -- a beauty queen, an American luxury car, and, behind a chain link fence, a cheering crowd. It’s a photo about apartheid, all right, but its message isn’t obvious.
Nontsikelelo Veleko: Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: Kepe I, 2003/2006. (Plate 103.)
Curiously, given the amount of space devoted to Goldblatt’s work, Darkroom doesn’t do him justice. It ignores two of his most important projects, Some Afrikaners Photographed and Boksburg, both of which were published as books. In them, his subjects are white South Africans, mostly Afrikaners, and their relationship to the country’s black majority. The photos are critical, compassionate, and often extraordinarily beautiful. Their absence is stunning.
The book also fails a much later series, in which Goldblatt photographed some of the many hand-lettered artisans’ signs that appear on urban roadsides. He then tracked down the artisans and made portraits of them in their working environments. It’s a brilliantly realized idea, connecting faces to the otherwise anonymous ads and exploring a vital niche in the post-apartheid economy. Darkroom includes a photo of one of signs, but not, inexplicably, the portrait of the man behind it. (His name is Corrie Jacobs. He and his sign appear in the book Rhizomes of Memory.)
This is an odd argument to make -- that there are too many Goldblatt photos, but too few of the right ones -- but so be it. Anyone interested in a tighter, yet more representative edit of his long and varied career should look at the chapter devoted to him in Paul Weinberg’s Then & Now: Eight South African Photographers (the link takes you to a slideshow of images from the book). In it, he was his own curator.
Schadeberg, Goldblatt’s contemporary (they began shooting professionally in the ‘50s and are still going strong), has 11 photos in the book, all but one from his early days as the photo editor at the now legendary Drum magazine. After a false start, Drum found its groove in the early ‘50s, catering to the tastes of urban and urbanizing Africans, covering politics, sports, and entertainment. Schadeberg and the photographers that he trained, including Kumalo, captured the energy and created the iconography of the era’s self-consciously cosmopolitan New Africans, from dapper political activists, such as the young Nelson Mandela, to jazz musicians in smoke-filled shebeens (above).
An interview with Zwelethu Mthethwa.
The photographs of Goldblatt, Schadeberg, and Kumalo call in to question the sharp dichotomy that the book draws between documentary and art. All have a documentary component, and some were first published and exhibited that way. After the fact, however, hanging on gallery walls or surrounded by thick white borders in elegant books, they’ve become art. The same photos, in different contexts, acquire new meanings.
Darkroom doesn’t see things this way. It relegates the older photographers (Goldblatt excepted) to a documentary past, in which even the best photos simply illustrated an unjust world. In contrast, the photos of younger generations of artists are seen to allow "complexity and contradictions to coexist," as Tumelo Mosaka writes in one of the accompanying essays. Yet complexity and contradiction were deeply embedded in many of the photographs that Schadeberg and Kumalo’s generation produced. The same can be said of most of the other photographs in the book. Mofokeng’s photographs of church ceremonies, Andrew Tshabangu’s street scenes, Mthethwa’s environmental portraits of workers and shanty dwellers, and Veleko’s urban hipsters -- all simultaneously describe and interpret. They don’t choose sides because they don’t have to; they are both documentary and art.
Darkroom’s condescending view of documentary work allows the book to exclude a number of significant photographers who worked in that mode and shaped the South African photographic tradition -- Bob Gosani, Ernest Cole, and Eli Weinberg. Well known documentary photographers who are still working, such as George Hallett and Jodi Bieber, are also missing. (Grantham hoped to include the work of Peter Magubane, a photojournalist who was probably South Africa’s best known photographer, in the 1970s, but his photos were not available.) Equally damaging is the absence of struggle photographers, who produced some of the most important work of the 1980s and ‘90s.
"Struggle photography" is something of a misnomer. Photographers associated with the movement produced a wide variety of work; it wasn’t the Bang Bang Club. For over a decade, struggle photography virtually defined documentary photography and photojournalism for many in South Africa and overseas. In the United States, their explicitly anti-apartheid and often elegantly crafted photographs were widely seen in newspapers and magazines, as well as in commercially successful books published by Norton and Aperture -- The Cordoned Heart (which included a documentary project by Goldblatt) and Beyond the Barricades. Many thousands of people also saw them in inexpensive, highly portable exhibitions that toured countless college campuses, church halls, and museums all over the country, generating support for the American anti-apartheid movement.
Who were the struggle photographers? Mofokeng was one, although the book is silent about that phase of his career. Graeme Williams, who is also in Darkroom, was another, a fact that you again won’t learn from the book. Those left out completely constitute a roster of important photographers who continue to influence photography in South Africa and beyond -- Omar Bashada, Paul Weinberg, Guy Tillim, Lesley Lawson, Gideon Mendel, and Chris Ledochowski to name a few of the most prominent.
In these conservative times, the struggle photographers’ highly politicized stance is embarrassing to some, and they find it easy to dismiss the entire movement. But there is no necessary contradiction between political commitment and good, even great photography. In fact, political engagement released an extraordinary creative energy. The evidence is in the photos that the struggle photographers produced -- alternately angry and lyrical, contemplative and direct. As Darren Newbury argues in his superb new book, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa, the struggle photographers were far from naive. Their photos constituted "a powerful indictment of apartheid. But it was not one that sacrificed complexity to broaden its appeal." Their impact on photography -- by no means just documentary photography -- was and is immense. No survey that aspires to be representative, let alone complete, can ignore this movement and the men and women who created it.
Should Darkroom have found space for all of the photographers that I’ve counted among the missing? Ideally, yes. In our less-than-perfect world, including everybody that I’ve mentioned was probably out of the question. But to include none of them and to ignore struggle photography altogether means that the book’s vision of South African photography is partial and distorted.
Although Darkroom fails as a survey of South African photography, it does present work that is almost always brilliant, challenging, and unknown to most Americans. In that sense, you can call it a success.
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Note: Another version of this review will appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies.
Update, 25 June 2010: The New York Times is the latest media outlet to discover, as if for the first time, that there are (shockingly!) poor whites in South Africa. The paper's Lens Blog has just posted an interview with Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly (see below) and a gallery of his photos from the Coronation Park, home to many impoverished white families. O'Reilly's comments are interesting, but he and the Times do leave the impression that poor whites are a recent phenomenon. In a comment that he just made about this entry, O'Reilly correctly points out that he did say, in the Times interview, that poor whites are not new, "but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past.”
We agree. Poor South African whites are nothing new. It's a long and fascinating story. Read on.
Update, 5 April 2010: The murder, last weekend, of Eugene Terre'Blanche, long-time leader of South Africa's Afrikaner Weerstandbewging [AWB=Afrikaner Resistance Movement], a small but violent neo-Nazi group, made headlines all over the world. It's also increased interest in the country's "poor whites."
It's worth making a couple of points about the AWB.
First, most of its members are not "poor whites." They tend to be lower middle class and solidly working class. Terre'Blanche himself was a relatively prosperous commercial farmer. (His murder was almost certainly not politically motivated. Police have arrested two suspects, both of whom are African workers on his farm, and say that killing came after Terre'Blanche and the men argued over unpaid wages.)
Second, the AWB was formed in the mid-1980s, a decade before majority rule came to South Africa, in response to the white minority government's tepid moves toward reform. Few blacks benefited from the reforms, but they were enough to frighten unskilled and semi-skilled white workers and farmers who relied on racial legislation for job security or control over their worker force. Some of these whites found strength and comfort in Terre'Blanche's mesmerizing rhetoric.
At its height, in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, the AWB claimed to have 15,000 members, a number which is probably much too high. The group's reputation for drunkenness and ill-discipline limited its appeal.
While the AWB was responsible for several murders and bombings, it had little impact on the movement toward democracy in South Africa.
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Every few years, the media rediscovers South Africa's most exotic species -- "poor whites."
White people, after all, aren't supposed to be poor, especially not in Africa. The white South Africans of our imagination are privileged -- each and every one of them -- and spend most of their time braaing boerewors by the pool, while their maids do the dusting and gardeners trim the hedges. When we discover that's not always true, it comes as a real surprise. It shouldn't -- we've learned this lesson more than once -- but, in the western imagination, whiteness is so firmly associated with affluence (and blackness with poverty) that we have to relearn it time and again.
Children walk through a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly
Last week, it was Reuter's turn to explore the lives and habitat the South African "poor white." The catalyst was a visit by President Jacob Zuma to a whites-only squatter camp, during which he pledged to ensure that its residents received their fair share of government services. Zuma first visited the camp in 2008, during his campaign for office, and said, at the time, that he was "shocked and surprised" by what he saw. (For him, too, whiteness and poverty were an unlikely combination.)
A family smokes together during a quiet moment at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 13, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly
Reuter's photographer Finbarr O'Reilly made these photos in Coronation Park, a former holiday caravan [trailer] park west of Johannesburg, that has become a refuge for impoverished whites. (This is not the site of Zuma's visits.)
In a post on Reuter's excellent photographers' blog, "Hardship Deepens for South Africa's Poor Whites," O'Reilly writes that, while "most white South Africans still enjoy lives of privilege and relative wealth, the number of poor whites has risen steadily over the past 15 years." He explains this increase by mentioning both "affirmative action laws that promote employment for blacks" and "the fallout from the global financial crisis."
That's certainly true, as far as it goes, but it's worth pointing out that poor whites, in South Africa, are nothing new. They were part of the social landscape long before affirmative action and the recent economic meltdown. White society in South Africa has always been stratified by class, no matter how strenuously those who promoted white supremacy and those who denounced it insisted otherwise.
Friends talk through the window of a one-room hut at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly
During the first two centuries of colonialism in southern Africa, the poor white settlers who attracted the most notice were the trekboers, semi-nomadic farmers who raised cattle and other livestock for the market. To many wealthier whites and European travelers, they were dirty, lazy, and racially degenerate, having adopted a mode of living that was indistinguishable from that of blacks. (It's a view that's had a very long shelf life, in both print and images.)
By the beginning of the twentieth century, poor whites were both an embarrassment and a threat, at least as far as their social superiors were concerned. The expansion of commercial farming in rapidly industrializing South Africa drove many whites off the land and into the cities, where they found work (or failed to find it) in mines, shops, and factories. Elites feared that they would combine with black workers to threaten capitalist development. A good deal of subsequent legislation was designed to make sure that would never happen, by offering whites access to jobs, education, housing, and political rights that were denied to blacks.
Family at lunch, 1962. David Goldblatt.
The policies of the segregationist governments, before World War II, and the apartheid government, after it, reduced white poverty, but didn't end it. Anomalies within a system of white supremacy, poor whites have been endlessly worried over, written about, and photographed, with various mixtures of curiosity, compassion, contempt, and concern.
No photographer has depicted poor white South Africans with more clarity and insight than David Goldblatt. His 1975 book, Some Afrikaners Photographed, while not specifically about poor whites, is nevertheless full of them. The photos, made during the decade of the '60s, are tough, where they need to be, and lyrical, where it suits. They refuse to condescend, and they rarely judge. When they celebrate, it's through moments of ordinary grace, as in the photo below. He understood that it was perfectly possible to be both a beneficiary of racial injustice and the victim of class exploitation.
Ella, daughter of Freek and Martjie Marais, in the children's bedroom, Gamkaskloof, Cape Province December, 1967. David Goldblatt.
By embracing complexity and respecting his subjects, Goldblatt found ways to get around and beyond conventional image-making.
If there's a man-bites-dog quality to most reporting about poor whites -- and there is -- the same can be said about reporting on rich blacks, especially, again, in Africa. Rich blacks fascinate us (western viewers and western media) for the same reason that "poor whites" do. They contradict our expectations of the way the world is "supposed" to be.
Durban, South Africa. July races, 2005. Martin Parr/Magnum.
Slate, the online magazine, recently published this photo from Martin Parr's series Luxury. In introducing the series, the magazine said that "Traditionally, the portrayal of poverty has been the domain of the 'concerned' photographer, but Martin Parr has photographed wealth in the same spirit, believing that when people of the emerging upper-middle classes around the world demand and receive the luxury goods that are taken for granted in the West, the pressure on the world’s resources will be considerable."
It's not entirely clear what Slate's editors mean by "in the same spirit." The spirit of exoticism and wonder with which poverty, particularly African poverty, has been approached? A spirit that sees "emerging upper-middle classes" as being as threatening as the poor, but in a different way (threatening to deprive us of the resources we need to sustain the western way of life)? Who knows? It's a statement that's illuminating partly because of its incoherence.
None of this, of course, is what Parr, elusive trickster and satirist that he is, would have had in mind. But, like all photographers, he has little control over how people interpret his work.
Charles Kapié with his partner in the street close to their office. At 30 years old he has created and runs a consulting firm in agronomy and a cyber café. He used to be a civil servant and he invested his "rappel" (first year of salary paid at once) in his activity and resigned after one year. He was paid $400/month. He situate himself in the middle of the Middle Classes. Joan Bardeletti.
Like Goldblatt's photos of impoverished whites, Joan Bardeletti's series Middle Classes in Africa is an antidote to the sort of nonsense that I've been talking about. Bardeletti says that he wants to present "a new but realistic vision of Africa to the public of developed countries." He hopes that his photos will lead people to question their preconceived ideas about Africa, "rather than inspire... pity about the continent."
This is some of the most original and challenging photography to come out of Africa in a very long time. You can see more of it, here.
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