Poor Whites & Photography in South Africa: The Backstory

Nanny with Stroller Strikes Terror in Hearts of Millions!

Ok, that's a bit of a stretch.  But, when Constance Stuart Larrabee made this photo of a black woman looking down at a white man (with revulsion, pity, or some combination of the two), she captured the anxiety that virtually all white South Africans felt when they contemplated the "poor white problem."

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Homeless man, 1947-48.  [Published caption, not by Larrabee, to a similar photo of the same man, made at nearly the same moment, Libertas magazine, June, 1947:  On a bench in the heart of Johannesburg a hobo lies sleeping.  Little can be done to make him useful to society.  But by influencing the young child and curing his personality defects, social welfare workers can prevent this waste of human material.]  (Click directly on any of these photos to see much larger versions.)

From the 1880s until the 1940s, the "poor white problem" was one of the most pressing issues in white South African politics.  Poverty was pervasive among white bywoners [sharecroppers] and small farmers.  It worsened as drought, war, agricultural mechanization, and the increasing dominance of large, commercial farms combined to push tens of thousands of them, mostly Afrikaners, out of the countryside and into the cities.  It was a process that South African historian Herman Giliomee calls "rapid, chaotic, and almost always traumatic."  Farming people found that they were ill-equipped to compete against either urban whites for skilled jobs and blacks for unskilled labor.  Many became desperately poor.

Elite and middle-class whites were certainly concerned about the well-being of their impoverished brethren.  But, as far as they were concerned, something larger was also at stake:  the preservation of South Africa's system of white supremacy.  As E.G. Malherbe, a rising social scientist and someone we will see more of below, wrote, in 1921, poor whites were "a menace to the self-preservation and prestige of our White people, living as we do in the midst of the native population that outnumbers us 5 to 1." They were a "skeleton in our cupboard, raising questions about the capacity of the ruling white race to maintain its dominance."

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Johannesburg social welfare, poor relief, 1947-48.  [Published caption, Libertas magazine, June, 1947:  Although food and other assistance are given under poor relief scheme, the poor are helped to help themselves.]

From the point-of-view of mid-twentieth-century white South Africans, this photo is less fraught -- nobody here is physically defenseless, incapacitated by drink -- but it would still have been troubling.  Black is again positioned above white; a black man is bringing aid and succor to whites.  The fact that the man is dressed in laborer's clothes would have lessened the tension only a bit.

Over the last few weeks, I've been wondering how aware Larrabee was about making images that captured so precisely the anxieties that poor whites evoked.  My guess is that she knew exactly what she was doing.  Not only did she possess an extraordinary ability to express herself visually, but, as a white South African whose friends included artists and intellectuals, she was inevitably aware of the debates that raged around the poor white problem.

Larrabee made the photos in this post to illustrate a story on social welfare programs in Johannesburg  that ran in the June, 1947, issue of Libertas, which called itself South Africa's first illustrated magazine.  As far as I've been able to determine, she was the first professional photographer to make pictures of poor whites.  (I'll be happy to hear about any earlier examples.)  Others photographers -- both amateur and professional -- had made photos of people who were poor and who happened to be white.  But Larrabee's photos are as much about a social social phenomenon and political issue as they are about individuals.  These are pictures of "poor whites," not whites who are poor.

It turns out, however, that an avid amateur photographer made what might have been the earliest photos of "poor whites" in South Africa.  (Again, I'm eager to hear new information.) 

 

 

Photo by E.G. Malherbe, in The Poor White Problem in South Africa:  Report of the Carnegie Commission, Vol. III, Education and the Poor White (1932).  (Remember, you can click directly on any of these images to see much larger versions.)

E.G. Malherbe, the man who called poor whites the "skeleton in our cupboard," made them while he was conducting research for the report on education that he wrote as a member of the Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa.  (The commission began its work in 1928 and published its findings in 1932.)  A specialist in educational policy at the University of Cape Town, with a B.A. from South Africa's Stellenbosch University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Malherbe was an obvious choice for the job.

As luck would have it, he was a life-long shutterbug, and he took his cameras with him when he conducted his fieldwork.

 

 

Photo by E.G. Malherbe, in The Poor White Problem in South Africa:  Report of the Carnegie Commission, Vol. III, Education and the Poor White (1932).

By the 1920s, photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine had long since demonstrated that the camera could be an investigative tool and that photographs could impart information that words couldn't duplicate.  This wasn't the way that Malherbe saw things.  For him, photos served merely to illustrate his text.  But the text, of course, was explicitly about the poor white question, and his photos are fascinating documents of the way in which poor whites lived.  Just as importantly, they document they way which Malherbe wanted them to be seen.

 

 

Photo by E.G. Malherbe, in The Poor White Problem in South Africa:  Report of the Carnegie Commission, Vol. III, Education and the Poor White (1932).

The Carnegie Commission, which was funded by the Carnegie Corporation, accepted white South Africans' fears that poor whites threatened the integrity of white supremacy and that this constituted a problem that had to addressed urgently.  The racial agenda wasn't hidden.  The commission admitted that the very "term ‘poor white’ could hardly have come into common usage except in a country inhabited by an inferior non-European population as well as by Europeans.  The term ‘poor white’ itself implies that traditionally the European inhabitants have a higher standard of living."

As an American foundation, the Carnegie Corporation would have been quite familiar with the "poor white problem."  In fact, the term "poor white" first came into general usage in the United States, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.   In his memoir, Never a Dull Moment, Malherbe drew a direct comparison between the United States and South Africa.  In both countries, he wrote,the issue was the preservation of white supremacy.  A concern for poor whites "is tinged with the fear that in open competition, the lower 10% of Whites will become subordinate to, say, the upper 10% of Blacks."  As impoverished as most black South Africans were at the time, the whites in Malherbe's photos certainly seem to be at risk of becoming part of that 10%.

 

 

Photo by E.G. Malherbe, in The Poor White Problem in South Africa:  Report of the Carnegie Commission, Vol. III, Education and the Poor White (1932).

My interest in this subject -- photography and poor whites in South Africa -- was sparked by a superb photo-essay that Reuters photographer Finbarr O'Reilly did, earlier this year, on poor whites in contemporary, post-apartheid South Africa.  (The essay received considerable attention, appearing, for instance, on the Reuters photographers' blog, the New York Times' Lens blog, and the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog.  The fascination with poor whites -- at least in cultures that, like America's, insist on connecting poverty with blackness, making poor whites compelling anomalies -- clearly hasn't gone away.)

When I wrote about O'Reilly's work, he sent me an email, gently correcting some mistakes that I'd made.  We exchanged several emails, afterwards.  In one of them, he generously told me about the photos that Larrabee had made for Libertas and suggested that I take a look.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Mother and children, 1947-48.

Obviously, Larrabee's photos are vastly different from Malherbe's, and vastly better.  He was a social scientist, after all, and she was an exquisite photographer, one of the finest of her generation (a fact that has been recognized by museums and galleries all over the world).  Her vision was shaped primarily by her training, while in Germany, in the aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit, that is, New Objectivity or New Realism.  As Brenda Danilowitz has pointed out, Larrabee's "smooth surfaces, clear design, sharp tonal contrasts, uncluttered design, textural veracity, and the elimination of extraneous detail" place her firmly within this modernist photographic tradition.

In her rare interviews, Larrabee spoke of being influenced, as well, by the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White.  That makes sense on several levels.  Bourke-White was, in her day, one of the most successful photographers in the world and one of the most famous.  Like Larrabee, she was also a committed modernist.  The most powerful connection was probably the fact that she and Larrabee had both photographed combat during World War II, making them two of the tiny handful of women to have done so.

Nevertheless, you can't look at the photos directly above and below without thinking of another American photographer, Dorothea Lange.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Girl with puppy, 1947-48.

Lange is best known as one of the photographers who worked the American government's legendary Farm Security Administration photo documentary project, during the 1930s and early '40s.  Many of her iconic photos are portraits, in which she was able to reveal beauty and humanity, even in the midst of hardship.  The fact that both Larrabee and Lange began their professional lives as highly regarded portrait photographers may account for the stylistic similarities.  More likely, Larrabee had seen Lange's work, which was widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines worldwide.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Children in ruined building, 1947-48.

Like Lange, Larrabee was doing more than making pretty pictures.  Probably as a result of her experience as a war photographer, she understood the ability of the camera to show things that words struggle to tell.  Here, white poverty is the problem, and the camera the tool that she uses to uncover some of the answers.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  White South African woman and child, 1947-48.

Not surprisingly, some of Larrabee's poor white photos are mundane.  Even these, however, demonstrate the ways that poverty among whites had changed over the last two decades.  It was now as much an urban problem as a rural one.  Even though the expansion of industry during World War II had gone a long way towards solving the poor white problem, unemployment had nearly doubled since the end of the war, and the cost of living was rising rapidly.  Poor whites were still on white South Africa's radar screen.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Three homeless men, 1947-48.

Mainstream social science of the day tended to blame the poor for their misery.  A photo of homeless men sharing a bottle in the middle of the day would seem to demonstrate the accuracy of that analysis.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Woman researching the homeless, 1947-48.

Even though the article that Larrabee's photos accompany suggests that adults are beyond help, this young social worker seems to be unwilling to give up the fight.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Cobbler, 1947-48.  [Published caption to a similar photo of the same man, made within a few moments of this one, Libertas magazine, June, 1947:  In the sheltered workshop handicapped men unable to compete in the open labour market are helped to become self-supporting.  Weaving and boot repairing are among the jobs they do.]

And why would she give up?  The article goes on to extol the success that social welfare programs have had in offering employment to handicapped men, many of whom were ex-servicemen.  (There's that modernist lens, again.  In this case, it makes us wonder how a man so ruggedly strong and self-contained could possibly need help.)

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Children painting at play center, 1947-48.  [Published caption to a similar photo of the same children, made at approximately the same time, Libertas magazine, June, 1947:  At the play centres children occupy themselves usefully in leisure time.  They are guided by specialists in social welfare work, in music, arts and crafts, and physical-training.  The workers aim at turning out balanced citizens.]

The article was especially proud of the work that social welfare agencies were doing with children -- enlightening them, as it were.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Boys with ball at Booysens play center, 1947-48.

I don't know whether to be appalled or amused by the fact that this classically modernist composition could easily have been made by a photographer working in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.  In any case, what modern state wouldn't want healthy, happy, disciplined, and cooperative young people such as these.

 

 

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Research charts on social welfare, 1947-48.

On the other hand, there something awfully American about the faith that, given enough time and sufficient funding, social science can solve any problem it confronts.

I'd like to believe that Larrabee was being ironic when she photographed this carefully constructed homage to social science.  But I'd be wrong.  It's the wrong era for that, and, besides, irony was never a part of her visual vocabulary.

A final note...  Just as some of Larrbee's photos resemble Dorothea Lange's, some of Finbarr O'Reilly's have an uncanny resonance with Larrabee's, a point that I've explored here and here.

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Update, 7 January 2011:  Ben Krewinkle, who has recently completed a superb thesis on the photography of poor whites in South Africa -- "Arm maar niet langer blank:  De ambigue verbeelding van de Zuid-Afrikaanse ‘armblankes’" ["Poor but no longer white:  The ambiguous image of South African 'poor whites'"] -- has written an important comment on one of my earlier posts about poor whites and photography.  With his permission, I'm adding it to this post.

Hello John, thank you for those interesting posts on 'Poor Whites and photography'.  Especially on the photographs by Larrabee, a photographer I hadn't heard of before.  I've finished a thesis on this topic last year in a Master of Photographic Studies.  Last winter I visited South Africa and photographed some impoverished whites in the Western part of Pretoria.  I also did reseach on the original photoalbums made by E.G. Malherbe.  In my thesis I wrote on the photographs of the Carnegie Commission as well as on David Goldblatt and the controversial photographs by Roger Ballen in his publications Dorps and Platteland.  Malherbe was not the first one who photographed the Poor White Community.  Marijke du Toit wrote an interesting article ('Blank Verbeeld' published in Hayes (P.) & Bank (A.) eds. KRONOS, journal of Cape history, no.27, November 2001, special issue: visual history) on the way the Poor Whites had been represented in an Afrikaner nationalistic magazine called Die Huisgenoot.  You might be interested in this article.  I'm planning to write an article on this topic and also on the photographs made by E.G. Malherbe.  I'm also producing an article on Some Afrikaners Photographed [by David Goldblatt] since this year there is an exhibition planned on this work in Huis Marseile, a photo museum in Amsterdam.

* * *

All of Larrabee's photos in this post are from the Constance Stuart Larrabee Collection at the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives,  National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC.

Text copyright John Edwin Mason, 2010.  Another version of this article is under review for publication.

Comments

[Stan B.]

Your posts on the work of Larrabee should be required reading for discussing Pieter Hugo's Hyena Men, no matter one's particular slant on it. Leni Riefenstahl's work in Africa also comes to mind after her "conversion." I'm sure many would say there's certainly nothing wrong in capturing for posterity the way a proud people "once" were- or even how a pristine land once looked (Ansel Adams). Again, as you point out, it very much depends on just how much you leave out (even Ansel had to struggle to leave out electric poles and wires- as well as the indigenous peoples that traversed his photographic territory), and how you set about portraying that selected imagery.

Of course, one can not help but marvel at just why white South Africans wanted to help out their poor brethren, not from the goodness of their collective heart, but simply to uphold their racist mythology.

[John Edwin Mason]

@Stan

Thanks very much for the comments.

You're absolutely right that a similar story can be told about other photographers, in other places.

[Jason]

Were the subjects of these photographs Afrikaners or English? Seems like that would make a big difference for the meaning of the representations.

[John Edwin Mason]

@Jason

"Were the subjects of these photographs Afrikaners or English?"

Great question.

In Malherbe's photos the answer is "yes," except where he identified one of his subjects as English-speaking.

In Larrabee's photos, it's unclear -- in both the original magazine article and in her archive at the National Museum of African Art. The answer can only be "probably." "Poor whites" were usually thought of as the rural poor or as people who had left the countryside for the cities. That population was overwhelmingly Afrikaner.

It was ministers in the largely-Afrikaans Dutch Reformed Church who, in the late nineteenth century, first identified "poor whites" as a problem.

Soon afterward, the idea of uplifting poor whites became a central theme in Afrikaner nationalist politics.

There were two worries: (1) that poor Afrikaners would sink to the level of blacks, live amongst them, and see them as equals and (2) that poor Afrikaners might come to believe that their political interests were best served by working-class politics, rather than Afrikaner nationalist politics.