More than a decade after the Market Photography Workshop was founded, a publication has been launched that illustrates the changing face of South African photography. Yazeed Kamaldien reports
Newtown’s Market Photography Workshop was started in 1989, and in reaction to the constraints of apart- heid it threw together people from all walks of life teaching them to paint with light.
More than a decade later its founder, the country’s leading documentary photographer David Goldblatt, his students and their teachers are telling a unique story in words and pictures in a new publication called Sharp .
Edited by Brenton Maart and TJ Lemon, it comprises the photography of past workshop students, some of whom like Themba Hadebe and Jodi Bieber have gone on to achieve international acclaim.
About 120 people complete courses at the workshop every year, some with the assistance of bursaries.
In his introduction to the book, Goldblatt recalls that at the time of the workshop’s founding “there was a need for something that would be easy to access, that would impart visual literacy and basic photographic skills and that, in doing so, might spark the spirits that had been depleted under the pall of Bantu Education.”
The aim was to combat the “ethnic surgery that had so successfully separated South Africa under apartheid”. He also reveals interesting historical facts about the photographic community at the time: “While they sanitised themselves by officially supporting sanctions, Kodak and Polaroid products continued to come into the country and supplied vital needs of the apartheid machine,” informs Goldblatt.
“Since their return, however, Kodak has become an important supporter of the workshop.”
Ironically, a characteristically apartheid post office, complete with “European” and “Non-European” entrances, became the venue from where the workshop would operate.
Its first teacher and director, Gillian Cargill, almost quit photojournalism while working a stint at the Financial Mail in 1980s Johannesburg. Teaching was her next step and Cargill now works as a photographer in the United Kingdom.
“I don’t remember consciously structuring my work at the MPW around any political axis. I love the idea of being in command of one’s own destiny. I did attempt to shamelessly advertise photography as a profound, provocative, therapeutic, entertaining mode of engaging with the world,” Cargill writes of her stint in Sharp.
While the good teachers moved on to further their own careers, it’s the MPW students who boldly stand out most in the world.
Themba Hadebe, an Associated Press photographer, studied at the MPW from 1991-94. By 1998 he had won various awards, including a World Press Photo Award that year for a Johannesburg scene of a criminal on his knees as his victim-turned-hero points a gun towards him.
But this success came only after Hadebe quit his job as a family restaurant chip-maker to pursue photography full-time. He says reading photo- grapher Peter Magubane’s biography offered the inspiration required to “put all my time into photography”.
“For me that was like suddenly I was back on my feet, and I was confident in what I was doing. It was something that I could identify with; he was South African, he was black,” says Hadebe in Sharp.
Another award-winning photographer associated with the MPW as lecturer and four-year director from 1990-94 is TJ Lemon. He won a World Press Photo Award in 2001. And former MPW student Motlhalefi Mahlabe, a performing-arts photographer at The Star newspaper, won his Fuji Press Award in 2000.
But most notable of the lot has been Jodi Bieber. To date she has garnered seven World Press Photo Awards four of them first prizes.
“The workshop was a place to begin. It was a place to settle all those things around f-stops and shutter speeds and get an idea of composition, an overall feel of things. And then the learning starts once you are on the street,” says Bieber.
Another woman in photography with MPW roots is former Mail & Guardian staffer Ruth Motau.
“When people from the township said ‘Wow! We saw your pictures in the M&G’ I started taking myself seriously as a professional photographer,” remembers Motau, adding that photography opened a new world for her.
“Sometimes, when I get to my shoot, people will look at me thinking, ‘Does she know what she’s doing?’ Or maybe they’ve never seen a black woman do this job. When I started at the M&G it was a bit difficult, but later I understood that it’s very rare to find a black woman photographer.”
According to Maart, the MPW has been “part of one solution helping to rebuild societies”. Cargill is hopeful that it will continue in this vein and offers an affirmation of belief therein.
“The workshop is a functioning organism. It’s had its ups and downs, but it works bloody well.”
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