Cedric Nunn: "Call and Response" at David Krut Projects, New York

My photography has always been rather quiet.  It's probably become a lot more quiet and, I hope, deeper.

--Cedric Nunn, September 2012

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Sometimes the most powerful photographs whisper.  They invite us into their world and make us want to linger.  They move us deeply without seeming to try.  We want to take them in slowly -- looking, thinking, feeling.  Images that refuse to shout can seem out of step with our culture of tweets and likes, buzz and blogs, but they're often the photos that we end up liking the best.  I suspect it's also the photography that will endure.

Cedric Nunn has been a name to be reckoned with ever since the 1980s, when he was a member of the Afrapix collective, making some of the most iconic photographs of the South African freedom struggle.  That's when I became aware of him.  But it's only in the last few years that I've begun to appreciate the depth and complexity of his body of work.

I'm not the only one to finally catch on.  Call and Response, a major retrospective, has been on view at David Krut Projects, New York, since last week.  The opening reception is on Wednesday, September 12th, from 6 to 8.  Do yourself a favor and stop by for a look.

 

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Blood Relatives.

"Blood Relatives" is the series that pulled me into Nunn's photography.  When we talked about it last week, he described it as a way of exploring what it means to be a mixed-race South African and "of getting to know my rather large extended family."  During the apartheid era, mixed-race people (Nunn is uncomfortable with the more common term "Coloured," seeing it an something imposed from the outside) found themselves existing uneasily between the politically dominant white minority and the large, restless African majority.

The end of apartheid was supposed to herald the dawn of a non-racial society, where people would be simply South African.  It hasn't worked out that way.  South Africans remain highly conscious of race.  Mixed-race or Coloured is still an identity that needs explaining and exploring.

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Blood Relatives.

Nunn began his work on mixed-race identity in Johannesburg, far from his birthplace in rural KwaZulu-Natal.  Things didn't go well.  As he puts it,

"I found the mixed-race people in Johannesburg were foreign to me.  I felt I was photographing them as people that I knew so little about....  Culturally they were quite different... they were city people...  And the Cape Town people were even more foreign to my experience of being mixed race.  I saw that the photos that I'd done of my own family were a lot more coherent and that's what lead me to focus on my family.

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Blood Relatives.

Nunn's photos in "Blood Relatives" don't provide any easy answers, for himself or for viewers.  Instead they invite reflection that is both personal and political, especially in the South African context.  Although the project was initially directed at mixed-race people, it speaks to everyone.

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Struggle.

Perhaps unusually for a photographer, Nunn "grew up in a family without a camera."  But it was a family that was nevertheless devoted to photographs.

...my mom had a big suitcase jam-packed with photographs.  Three or four times a year, we'd gather in her room, and she'd shift through all these photographs.  It was a bit of a history lesson for us.  We'd learn about the family, we'd learn about incidents in her life.

Nunn's father, who spent most of his working life managing stores for white owners, subscribed to Time-Life books, which were something of a lifeline for a poor child in the countryside.  "Once a month," Nunn remembers, "these books would arrive -- these incredible journeys into foreign lands."

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Struggle.

After he was forced to leave school at 16 and begin work in a sugar factory, Nunn subscribed to Time magazine, not because he was inspired by the photojournalism, but as an alternative to the government propaganda that he heard on the radio and too often read in the press.  Time and the Time-Life books, however, prepared him for what came next.

Hanging out in Durban, in the late 1970s, Nunn met Peter McKenzie, a photography student who was only a couple of years older.

The catalyst, and it really was that, was when I went to his humble little garden cottage that he was renting with his wife and his kids, and I saw his portfolio and those images...  I was completely blown over by that experience and I recognized that this was in fact what I wanted to do.

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Struggle.

Nunn's friendship with McKenzie led him to Omar Badsha, one of founders of Afrapix and among South Africa's best known photographers.  "That was my education -- Omar Badsha.  Not in any overt way.  He gave me the space to grow."

Nunn joined Afrapix, in the early 1980s, after travelling through Europe.  ("That was another aspect of my education to go and locate myself in Europe in relative freedom.  To breath the air and explore.")  Even as a member of the collective, producing what became known as "struggle photography," Nunn refused to shout.  In the right hands, poetry is as powerful as a policeman's truncheon.

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Cuito Cuanavale.

The struggle photographers were, in effect, war photographers.  Nunn says, "we saw people dying constantly.  ...We were all subjected to an incredible array of emotions and disorientation as a result of that."

Part of the healing for Nunn was to work on "Cuito Cuanavale," a project that involved photographing the site of one of the most significant battles in the external wars that apartheid South Africa fought in its attempt to keep white supremacy alive in southern Africa.  South Africa's retreat, in the face of the overwhelming strength of the Angolan military and its Cuban allies, was a turning point in the freedom struggle.  As the new, democratic South Africa's ambassador to Cuba said in 2005, "the blood of Cuban martyrs... runs deep in the African soil and nurtures the tree of freedom in our country."

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Cuito Cuanavale.

This post has barely touched the surface of Nunn's life and body of work.  You can see much more on his website and at David Krut Projets, New York.

Nunn's photos are also part of the large group exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid:  Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, which runs from 14 September to 6 January 2013, at the International Center of Photography, in New York.

 

Cedric Nunn:  From the series Blood Relatives.

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Finally, this video will give you a sense of the man himself.

 

 

cueTV:  Cedric Nunn, Photographer.

 

Comments

[s'busiso nxumalo]

thanks for this post. i needed to read someone else's thoughts to clear the view so i could see what i must always have known, or more accurately to give words to what i have always felt when i looked at cedric's work. again, thanks!

[Ekavira Verma]

Ah! I take a teensy cutoff from the blogging realm and
come back to find that you have a ton of followers?
! Wow, times have changed! Keep up the sensational work!