An exhibition running in Johannesburg rediscovers six `lost’ South African photographers, writes Hazel Friedman
`WITHIN the black zone, every square inch is occupied … It’s like being buried in people. Their shoulders, hips, bellies and buttocks press against yours. You cannot shift your weight or raise an arm or turn around without displacing the various bodies that encompass you. Finally a train pulls in and the doors open …”
A day in the life of apartheid South Africa taken from Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, a collection of photographs hidden, until now, from South African eyes. It forms part of Margins to Mainstream, a compelling exhibition assembled by the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape as part of an ongoing project to recover previously “lost” aspects of our cultural history.
Among South Africa’s unsung heroes are six photographers who documented the struggle against apartheid — and just to survive.
Bob Gosani, Willie de Klerk, Eli Weinberg, Leon Levson, Ernest Cole and Ranjith Kally came from different walks of life. But they were united as the pioneers of South Africa’s distinguished tradition of documentary photography. And at last their story is being told.
Until the 1950s, black photographers were unheard of in South Africa. But through grit, and support from legends like Jurgen Schadeberg — then pictures editor of Drum magazine — Cole and Gosani became central figures in the first generation of disenfranchised photographers.
De Klerk and Kally also did time on Drum, as well as The Golden City Post, among other local publications. Levson was the outsider, recording the influx of Africans into townships, squatter camps and mines during the late 1940s and 1950s.
Weinberg, the activist, participated in the events he photographed. His political resume — imprisonment, house arrests and bannings — prevented him from acquiring South African citizenship, though the Latvia-born photographer and trade unionist had lived in the country since the late 1920s.
He went into exile after the Soweto uprisings and died in Tanzania in 1981. His book, Portrait of a People, was banned in South Africa until 1990. Unable to take his negatives with him when he fled, he subsequently discovered the majority had been lost or destroyed. The remnants are with the Mayibuye Centre.
Inspired by legends like Alfred Steiglitz, Lithuania-born Levson began working as an apprentice photographer in 1908. He developed extensive knowledge on techniques which, together with a love for art, informed his painterly style. Understated and unembellished, his works made him South Africa’s first social-documentary photographer of note. Yet the photographs he left behind after his death in 1968 are only now receiving the acclaim they deserve.
But Levson and Weinberg, unlike De Klerk, Cole, Gosani and Kally, were protected from the indignities of apartheid by the colour of their skin. Levson, in particular, displayed naivety when describing the conditions of black mineworkers. To him the mines were places where “the wanderlust of youth finds a certain satisfaction … and the wonders of the white man’s life were experienced at close quarters”.
To Cole, the mines, train rides and locations in the sky — servants’ quarters at the top of affluent apartment blocks — were not subjects worthy of aesthetic contemplation. To the “great comet of black journalism”, they were a daily indictment of an oppressive system. Cole went into exile in 1966, taking the negatives of House of Bondage with him. It was published a year later in New York and is still described as one of the great photographic books of all time.
But, as with so many artists who were forced to leave South Africa, Cole became enslaved to the memory of his home. Five years ago he died in New York, destitute and alone.
“Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse” was Gosani’s motto. Steeped in the culture of the township netherworld, he captured the essence of shebeens and township shacks, even giving a glimpse into jails where black prisoners were forced to perform a dance to reveal concealed drugs. But Gosani ventured too close to the urban underbelly. He died in 1970, ravaged by drink and disease.
Not all of the tributes paid to these unsung heroes are in the form of epitaphs. Kally and De Klerk (the latter was the first black photographer employed by The Argus in the 120 years since its inception) are still taking pictures. Both were born to impoverished families — De Klerk used his grandmother’s closet as a darkroom — and their first photographic purchases were cheap Kodak cameras. They worked their way through various publications, reaching the forefront of the discipline.
Looking at this exhibition, not only do you get a taste of a lost chunk of South Africa’s cultural history, but an insight into the lives of six men on the beat, armed with their cameras and a commitment to truth.
Margins to Mainstream runs at the Newtown Galleries until September 21