Chris Dunton
ALF KUMALO: SOUTH AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHER edited by Itala Vivan (Leonardo Arte)
This beautifully designed and printed album reproduces around 150 of Alf Kumalo’s photos, ranging from his work in the 1950s as a Drum staffer to photos of the 1990s. Four decades worth of some of the most striking photo-reportage produced in South Africa.
Short essays by Mongane Wally Serote and others introduce the collection (Noris Lazzarini writes on the task of scouring the archives for negatives, in the search for adequate captions); the album closes with samples of page layouts from Drum, showing how the work first worked, and a biography of Kumalo by Itala Vivan.
With the photos arranged thematically – each section prefaced with a poem by Serote – the book focuses first on the 1956-61 treason trial. Marvellous, telling shots are here. The trialists in a bus on their way to the courthouse, this arrangement (managerial and visual) demonstrating the placid normalisation of state terror; Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo and Ruth First during a break in hearings, radiantly confident, dressed as if for a reception.
>From a later period, Soweto 1976, the book reproduces photo after photo of massed crowds, this sequence offering a cumulative sense of unstopability. And in the famous photo of the funeral after the Uitenhage massacre, raised in the centre of the crowd 19 coffins run like a causeway.
A step away from the political arena, Kumalo photographs soccer and boxing matches and jazz at Dorkay House. And poverty: three street-children on a kerb, facing the night-time traffic, another in the foreground, gazing in rapt concentration at a shop window display.
Personality shots include one of the sinister CK Madikizela, louring, watchful, at HF Verwoerd’s funeral; and a beautiful, tender shot of Muhammad Ali, filial, arm around Oliver Tambo’s shoulder, leaning forward to hear what the old man says.
Amongst all these shots, and reminding one of the complex structuring of southern African society, there are photos of the Shaka Day celebrations, the investiture of Swazi King Mswati III, Basotho women’s initiation (the cover photo: as these things do, provoking intractable questions about the relationship between subject, artist, viewer/consumer). There is, too, a substantial clutch of photos taken in Lesotho. Like the whole collection, these prompt the recognition that, in Vivan’s words, photo-reporting is “the art of structuring a story”.
See the shot, for instance, taken at the state visit of Seretse Khama of Botswana to Lesotho, 1968 – the positioning of Lady Khama in the centre, facing camera: in a photo taken just a few kilometres from the South African border, how do we read her pose, her expression? Surely – with a touch of irony, perhaps – here is the defiant assertion, “see what can be done”.