A retrospective of Jrgen Schadeberg’s work over the last 40 years confirms his enduring photographic eye. HAZEL FRIEDMAN spoke to him
IT takes a strange kind of eye to be able to see life constantly through a lens — a kind of nomadic outsider-looking-inside perspective and a remarkable degree of detached curiosity. Not to mention a simple desire to tell stories in pictures.
Jrgen Schadeberg possesses those sensibilities. He also has the ability to extract beauty from apparent banality. And unlike many of the flashier news photographers who wilt between adrenalin hits like junkies between fixes, he focuses as much on the spaces between the frames as the frozen moments themselves.
It is tempting to idealise the man as much as one does his work. He is, after all, the photographer who practically launched a generation of black photographers, some of whom remain South Africa’s brightest photography stars. During his Drum years he also epitomised the romantic image of the photographer as handsome, reckless hero.
But Schadeberg has also been accused of remaining arrogantly frozen in an era immortalised in Drum magazine: Sophiatown in the 1950s. Even though his more recent work of Bushman initiation rites has received acclaim and his short films are shown on television and at festivals worldwide, the name Schadeberg remains attached to a time of forced removals, jazz kings, shebeen queens and skokiaan.
His retrospective casts a more enduring light on the photographer commonly dubbed South Africa’s own Eisenstaedt. Divided into three components — the Drum years; his later work in Britain and Europe freelancing; images of South Africa in the last two decades — Schadeberg has whittled 2 000 work prints down to a mere 300. Instead of going the conventional route of displaying them in chronological order, he has juxtaposed diverse images, sometimes from different eras, establishing a series of conceptual correspondences or tensions between them.
For example, his series of wedding photographs generates a sense of universalism through a rite of passage practised by every colour, class and creed. And his images of white South Africa set up a tension with those indelibly dynamic scenes from Sophiatown.
Inevitably, the exhibition also charts Schadeberg’s professional evolution. The compositions of the European pictures are more complex, and subtler in tone, compared with their starker, contrasty South African images.
But all the images — whether of writer Arthur Maimane seated in the Drum offices, looking part-dandy, part-debt collector, or of a little girl skating joyously in England — are clearly the product of some precious moments. “I was afraid to publish that one,” he says, pointing to Party Girl, the image of a wench practically bursting though her bustier in a London discotheque. “I had gone to this club to photograph a pop star, but was completely fascinated by what seemed to me — if it wasn’t for her convincing breasts — to be a drag queen. “
The Dagga Smokers resembles Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters with its gritty, rough-hewn realism. They were a bunch of outies spliffing spiritual smoke in a derelict Sophiatown doorway during the early 1950s. “They were delighted to be photographed,” recalls Schadeberg. “At first they clowned around a bit but then they simply carried on doing their thing, oblivious to me.”
“You have to train your eye to see certain way,” he explains.”Its like learning to paint a single Zen brushtroke to depict a bamboo stick on canvas.”
It is clear from his photographic opus that Schadeberg’s canvas is far from completed.
Schadeberg’s work can be seen at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until January 5