Veteran photographer Jrgen Schadeberg has two shows now on one of old work, one of new pictures
Shaun de Waal
‘Imagine,” says Jrgen Schadeberg: ”there’s a man in a white suburb, watering his garden on a sunny day. Opposite him is a small mine dump. A car pulls up on to the property of the?minedump. Out of it gets a young man with a camera, or a number of cameras,?and a young black woman with a bag full of clothes, and they both climb on?to the mine dump.
”So this man [in the garden] goes and phones the police. Next thing, a?number of squad cars arrive I’m imagining this, I don’t know what?happened, but it must have been somebody who was watering the garden or?something. The squad cars surround the mine dump and push these two people?around and arrest them. It was a really strange world.”?
The veteran photographer is remembering South Africa in the Fifties, an era?he famously documented, especially the vibrant life of Sophiatown, its?shebeens, musicians and pin-up girls. He also helped create the cultural?aura of that era, one that was rediscovered and given a new political?meaning in the Eighties, with his more stylised images of icons such as?Miriam Makeba and Dolly Rathebe (on the mine dump) for the cover of Drum?magazine.
Schadeberg has two shows now on in Johannesburg one of his photographs of white people in the Fifties and another of images of Soweto taken this?year. He also has a show now on in New York, drawn largely from his Fifties work.
I asked him whether it was true to say that his Fifties images are so famous that they have overshadowed the work he has done since.?
”I’ve done a lot of things, except they haven’t been looked at,” he says. ”That’s one of the reasons I’ve done The White Fifties in South Africa. When I spoke to a group of Soweto students, they asked, ‘Why?do you photograph black people?’ I’ve got a couple of answers. First, I?photograph people, not black people. Also, I concentrated on showing my?images of the black world because it was more relevant at the time it was?forgotten, it had been ignored, that particular world of the Fifties.
”Now I’m showing the images of white people in the Fifties, so that’s the other side of the coin. When I came to South Africa I was quite taken aback?by these two different societies, parallel to each other.” He laughs. ”I had more problems in the white world than the black world, because some of these people rejected me once the story was published in the?Sunday Express ‘Young German photographer arrested on mine dump with?young native girl’.”?
There is a tension in Schadeberg’s work between the kind of attitude pioneered by Henri Cartier-Bresson catching life on the hoof, not intervening but simply observing and his more stylised images, such as?the Drum beauty queens. His new, colour images of Soweto?are very informal; many appear to be mere snapshots of ordinary life. Yet?within the past few years he has also taken a series of stark portraits,?concentrating on faces. Are there, I ask him, two different streams?in his work?
They are almost two different media, he says, like oil painting versus watercolours. ”Your way of seeing will be different. With the more formal images, you use?different cameras, for a start, and you set yourself up to shoot something?formal, so you’re actually using a different medium. With the informal?images, you are trying to arrest a moment in time, what Cartier-Bresson?called ‘the decisive moment’. You attempt to produce an image that tells a?story. The subject is part of, or related to, the environment, the situation,?the space, whereas with a formal image [you have] only the subject.”
As for the recent portraits, which puzzled some observers at the time, their?roots go deep in Schadeberg’s oeuvre, and perhaps represent a?third stream in his work.?
In the Seventies, in London, while teaching photography and film-making at a college there, he took portraits of students and staff members. ”When they?looked at the pictures they all recognised each other,” he recalls, ”but?there was one person nobody recognised a distinguished-looking man in his?late 40s. He was a cleaner.?
”So then I thought, ‘We presume we see something in a face, but do we?’ I?photographed a village in England, from the lady of the manor down to the?dustman, and the game was that you had to guess who was who. I did the same in Germany, and then I did married couples, people who’d been married 25?years or more, and you had to find who was married to whom, in order to?really look at faces. It was a fascinating experience.”
In a press release for Soweto 2001, Schadeberg talks of revisiting?the city 50 years after his first experiences there, when he ”spent?many hours, days and nights in Orlando township”, where friends and?colleagues such as Henry Nxumalo and Todd Matshikiza lived (having been?removed from Sophiatown). ”At that time,” he writes, ”Soweto was a gray?place. There was no electricity, no phones, no taxis, no hawkers, no shops?… Now, 50 years later, I rediscovered Soweto, a place of dynamic energy with improvisation in all areas.”
Another difference, now, I point out, is in the photographer. He is no?longer a part of the culture he is depicting. Aren’t these images of?Soweto in 2001 those of a tourist??
”To a degree, yes, that’s right,” he admits. ”On the other hand, why not? I?went into situations where tourists would not usually go. I spent?two and a half months on this and if it’s possible to carry on I’ll go?deeper into it. Some of the pictures may be somewhat superficial, but the?average person who comes from the white world in South Africa doesn’t see?Soweto at all, is frightened to go there. How would the National Geographic cover Soweto?”?
Is he saying, I ask, that the eye of the outsider can provide a fresh perspective?
Yes, he says. It is necessary to go beyond clichd images that reiterate the?way township life was represented, for instance, during the years of?struggle and turmoil the images of revolt and suffering.
Is he then, I ask, making a deliberate effort to see life in Soweto today in a positive light??
”If I had come across images of blood and suffering,” he replies, ”I wouldn’t have looked the other way … [Among the images] I’ve got a guy in?a squatter camp selling ice creams and a little boy sitting reading a book? How to Learn English. It is depressing to walk through a squatter camp,?but within it there is dignity.”
The White Fifties in South Africa runs at The Bensusan Museum of Photography in Newtown from April 22 to June 24; Soweto 2001 runs at Art on Paper in Melville until April 28