A photographic display in the Northern Province puts its big-city rivals to shame. Stephen Gray looks at the life of one of the best chroniclers of South Africa’s past Prizing itself on its uniqueness, the new provincial capital of the north, Pietersburg, has a cultural attraction which is without equal in South Africa an entire museum building devoted to the subject of its history in photography.
In the rest of the country some well-known photographic collections are held the Bensusan in the MuseuMAfrica in Johannesburg, or the Denfield in the East London Museum but few come near to the Pietersburg display, now safely settled in their Hugh Exton Photographic Museum. For such records of village life, the Lomax Collecton in Molteno is a noteworthy rival, but that includes the years 1894-1909 only. The Exton holdings cover more than three times the Lomax span, stretching across an extraordinary career, from the 1890s when the town was first established and on, for the next 50 years. With his tripod and lens, Exton became as familiar a sight to Pietersburgers as their local town hall, and their oldest resident at the rattling good age of 91. The museum currently has on display a selection of his work in and about the town, including exhibits of his various antique plate cameras and even the old studio props that recur in the pictures. But everything about the Exton story has an air of having been rescued in the nick of time. The building itself, once the first Dutch Reformed chapel, right in the landscaped gardens of the civic square, from being rented out as Bava’s Bargain Bazaar has been restored. The collection itself, consisting of a mindboggling stash of negatives, includes a proportion of Exton’s appointment books, recording the dates of each click of the shutter and the name of every sitter with the fee paid. All this once went up for auction for next to nothing and was shunted down to the National Archives in Pretoria for decades of safekeeping and oblivion. Returned to the Pietersburg community, the collection is now in daily use, its current curator still identifying and classifying. Brittle and frangible, the Exton negatives are printed on glass. That means they are exquisite to hold up to the light, lacily delicate. At the right angle, another fresh item of yesteryear leaps into the present. Astoundingly, there are more than 23 000 of these, cabinet after cabinet stacked. Once Exton was installed in his first corrugated-iron studio on that crossroads to the interior, he offered his substitute for television: Transvaal and Mashonaland views for sale. Clearly he just hunkered down and let his subjects come to him. Of course they all called him Meneer Eksteen. And they all came going off to war or to the altar or to the Native Recruiting Corporation. The Rosenbergs and the Rassools arrived with their new hats, as did the Krugers and the Krauses. The hunters posed on sumptuous karosses, the bulbous nuns under veils and fey priests in arches. The carpenters showed off their hacksaws and Francis Kelly his champion racing bike.
Mr Springmann brought in his new baby, to pose with the klonkie, holding an umbrella. Mr Mohale in his tweed suit, in March 1927, posed between his two traditional wives, hat on the floor to draw attention to his polished shoes. A young blade in bangles disports himself alongside his barefoot, staring sweetheart, beautifully decorated. A uniformed policeman, at attention, coerces his wrinkled outa to take his place as well in a mere loincloth: the
different generational styles express more than words. Then came the town’s first black graduate.
These cabinet portraits of black groups I tried on the master photographer David Goldblatt, to test if he did not feel that old lensman’s attitude of nearly a century ago was not perhaps a bit colonial, incorrect for the modern way of seeing. Was not his white stare somehow demeaning, and could it give offence? But Goldblatt was emphatic: there is no snideness or condescension in evidence in Exton’s work. That is exactly how his customers wished themselves to be seen, and what they paid for, they got. Goldblatt had other comments to make of a more technical nature: see how, before the days of polychromatic film, all the lips come out pitch black. Exton’s depth of field is also so narrow, subjects’ toes are often out of focus.
So are those standard backgrounds of pots and palms and balustrades, meant to come out impressionistic. For years on end, Exton never bothered to rehang his misty drapes, and so they became a valuable clue for dating. Exton’s own portrait of 1913, as was the fashion, is heavily touched up, shadows added in the dark room and skin-blemishes erased. By the 1990s, when his business became well established, he employed a full-time assistant at the retouching desk. The duties of the village photographer included outdoor work, as the historic events depicted in the museum make especially clear. Exton covered the Zeederberg transport- riders’ attempt to inspan an intractable zebra-train when horses for stagecoaches were dying of horse-sickness. Then there is the opening of the railhead and the first air crash. General Botha visits and the ladies ride side-saddle, picnics with beefcakes and vampish bathing belles, a single murder scene. For the proprietors he photoed the Grand Hotel, the Gaiety Hall Tea Rooms and Confectionery, even the CNA window full of Venus pencils. He recorded banks when they established themselves, the first office of the Zoutpansberg Review, and then the second when the British troops blew it up and then again when Herman Charles Bosman took it over, in 1943 during another war. A refugee in 1900, he had fled to the Cape and specialised in battlefields. His survey balloon rising over Magersfontein, and those horse carcases blown up alongside bombarded trenches at Paardeberg, have become generic. Seldom attributed to him, they are used over and over to illustrate the fascination and the horrors of that Anglo-Boer South African War. Towards the end of his life Hugh Exton wrote an autobiography, but admitted it was not so spellbinding. What was far more interesting, he remarked, was what he managed to get his viewers interested in: the shape of gates and transoms, marcelled permanent waves, odd mealie cobs, a record rose. His recipe for a happy life for young males was just this: fresh air, a good wife and “not spending half one’s days in the cinema”. When Basil Fuller interviewed him just before his death, he concluded that with Exton all days were good days. And the hale, chipper enjoyment of life comes across abundantly in the work he left behind. But I suspect there was also much amusement too to be had in Exton’s world, as there still is. He and his lady receptionist used to place bets when shy customers sidled along. Take the case of the “country bumpkin who barged in with his young fiance, so dood verlief on her he could only hang round her waist”. The wager was how many weeks it would take before he ran down the dusty main street of that northern dorp, pursued by a fryingpan. Exton recorded that his own first experience of the modern artform was traumatic and hateful. While at school in Cape Town, he was taken to Barnard’s studio in Adderley Street, and had his head fixed to a pillar to hold it still. He had to keep staring, while the disinterested photographer walked up and down counting out 15 seconds. He said the result looked like dead meat. There and then he decided that he would devote his life to approaching the whole matter of photography differently. And so he did, keeping track of every latest technique. He also said he never regretted his decision. For further information contact the curator of the Hugh Exton Photographic Museum, Hester Roodt, at (015) 290-2185, or Linda Swart of the Pietersburg Museum, to which it is attached, at (015) 290-2181.