Legend: Hugh Masekela, known for his jazz compositions and anti-apartheid songs, ‘lived for music since I could think’. Photo: Brett Rubin
At the opening of the exhibition, Home Is Where the Music Is, celebrating the life and times of musician Hugh Masekela, his sister shared memories of growing up with him. Barbara Masekela jokingly noted the fact that in South Africa people refer to him as Bra Hugh but they call her “aunty”.
“He lied to people and told them he was younger than me when, in fact, he was two years older than me. But I didn’t mind,” she said.
The exhibition, hosted by Rand Merchant Bank and the Hugh Masekela Heritage Foundation, is the third in a series of showings of Hugh Masekela portraits by Brett Rubin, his personal photographer from 2012 to 2018. It stands out for including rarely seen items and memorabilia from Masekela’s personal archive. Rubin’s series of portraits represent a seven-year chronicle of the musician’s last years and his central politics and obsessions.
The composition portrays Masekela in an intimate fashion where one looks at the patterns of his facial lines and the greying of his eyes to feel what they might communicate. Some images show a sternness that contrasts with the youthful, mischievous personality that one always got from an encounter with Masekela, a side of him that his sister readily notes in her stories.
Rubin says that his intention with the portraits was mainly to document Masekela at that stage in his life; to try to portray what he had lived through, rather than attempt to
bring forth a personality or character that everybody knows.
“What got me the job was more from the photographs I didn’t take than the photographs I did take,” he says.
“What I mean by that is that over the years of his career, Bra Hugh had many people photographing him, getting him to perform and telling him to do things or trying to get a shot from him. Some of that really annoyed him. My approach was one of ultimate respect. I wanted to strip away everything and make things as simply as possible. I didn’t push him and I didn’t try to overdo things. We would chat and do other things where I wouldn’t have my camera out. He felt very comfortable in that setup.”
Bra Hugh Masekela and his photographer Brett Rubin.
Rubin got an audition shoot with Masekela after speaking to Masekela’s manager, Josh Georgiou, about his approach to photography after the musician’s image appeared on the launch issue of Rolling Stone South African magazine.
Days before the audition Rubin worried about getting a playlist together.
“I remember being completely daunted by the idea of having to make a playlist for the day. What do you play for Bra Hugh? And this is for the audition that led to many of the great images included in the current exhibition and made it onto his album covers.
“I played safe jazz standards like Miles Davis and a little bit of Fela Kuti. Bra Hugh found the whole thing quite funny,” he says.
Rubin doesn’t think you can capture the essence of someone in a portrait. He believes in getting to know someone through the process of taking their picture.
“Often, I don’t ask people to look into the camera. The image of Bra Hugh’s stern stare came out of a mixture of things that captured it. The tent I had built outside the studio was extremely bright. Often his eyes would water because of the glare. But at some point, he came up and just looked at the camera,” Rubin says.
“There’s also the photo of him covering his face, which I really love because even though you don’t see his face, there’s a sense of him looking through. That also came about as he was covering his face from the glare. There’s a lot that you plan and a lot that you leave to chance. Throughout a series of these shoots, Bra Hugh was aware of where he was in his life and career.”
The exhibition takes its name from the title of Masekela’s 1972 album. Home Is Where the Music Is, with its melancholic, spiritual and groovy tones, encapsulates Masekela’s story as a meditation on the dilemmas of exile, migration and a longing for a home with no borders. The themes it invokes link themselves to political conversations that thread his life together.
Ten years into his exile life in the US, in 1971 a depressed Masekela wrote his masterpiece, Stimela, about the injustices of South Africa’s migrant labour. The song was recorded for the first time for his 1974 album, I Am Not Afraid.
Rubin’s portrait of Masekela blowing on his fluegelhorn and overlaid with the image of a steam train is a compelling attempt to capture the mood, idea and symbolism of the song. The image also aligns with Rubin’s photographic philosophy to challenge the conventions of the medium through an exploration of memory, infrastructure and landscape.
“Bra Hugh had expressed a desire to have an official music video for Stimela. And that image laid the foundation for an animated short film of the song by animator Thabang Lehobye. We had discussed this with Bra Hugh before his passing, and he was keen on the idea. The charcoal animation video is still in the process of being finished. Hopefully by the end of this year it will be out. I know it’s been submitted to the Loeries,” Rubin says.
Masekela once said: “I lived for music since I could think.”
Rubin is a bass guitarist. What appealed to him about photography was album design and visuals that complement a song. Perhaps it is this innate affinity to music that sealed the connection between the music legend and his young photographer.
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