Photography in South Africa: Pre- and Post Apartheid

From the 1980’s until the present there has occurred a significant shift in the subject matter and style of the South African photojournalism. The fluctuation of the political circumstance in country, during and after Apartheid, undoubtedly played its part in this transformation. However, one might wonder how much the photojournalist’s personal incentive influenced his stylistic transformation. More importantly, what consequences did these changes of style and subject matter have – not just for the physical image, but more so for the institutional space in which it was exposed as well as for the younger contemporary photographers? When the newspaper became disinterested, the gallery became interested and what occurred was a two-way compromise between photographer and institution.    

Eric Miller joined Afrapix in 1980 and became one of the first local photojournalist to document the struggle against Apartheid. Miller, together with photojournalists such as Paul Weinberg, Guy Tillim and David Goldblatt dedicated their careers to giving a voice to the victims of Apartheid in international media. These photographers used their cameras as weapons to fight against the Afrikaner Nationalist regime and to reveal the truth of what really happened ‘beyond the barricades’. As Miller explains “...going out there with my camera was a way of going to see for myself ...  to see the truth”. Miller published his work locally and internationally in news publications such as Time, New York Times, The Weekly Mail and New Nation. He also became a member of the news agency Reuters in 1988.

During the struggle Miller’s subject matter consisted of protests, shoot-outs, police raids, necklacings, forced removals and funerals - what in theory came to be known as ‘the aesthetic of flags and fists’ of photographs from the Apartheid era. This ‘aesthetic’ was a crucial requirement for all photographs aimed at making hits in the originally unresponsive, international news media. Images were explosive, action-packed and fast-paced with blood, dead bodies and guns making a frequent appearance. These photographs became the rescue material – the visual SOS signals informing an entirely oblivious international audience. This is what Paul Weinberg termed the ‘Then’ of photojournalism in the exhibition held at the Albany Museum in Grahams Town in 2007 discussing the stylistic transformation of photojournalists working in pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa. On 11 February 1990, the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison, was when this ‘Then’ became the ‘Now’ in local photojournalism – when the photojournalist’s subject matter crumbled together with Apartheid regime. Miller expresses what he felt during this part of his career:

It was quite a challenge to transform myself from being a news photographer ...to recording the slower, more human processes in the country.

In the following decade, Miller produced an entirely different body of work omitted of the horror and violence of previous years. This work rather concerned the more positive transformational processes occurring in South Africa at the time. He directed his attention to topics such as local health care and housing development, produced essays on subjects like women’s boxing and sangoma culture and applied himself to more educational purposes, writing articles and supplying photographs to publications like the Rhodes Journalism Review.

In 2003 Miller published a book with co-authors Görrel Espelund and Jesper Strudsholm.  For this project – entitled Reality Bites – Miller travels the rest of Africa documenting inspiring stories of individual Africans who have managed to advance in spectacular ways.  Aimed at reversing the view of the miserable African stereotype, this project revealed the more hopeful Africa. Amputee soccer in Sierra Leone; A children orphanage in Zambia and two ex-soldier Sudanese youth are just a number of the themes covered in this book. In the post-Apartheid years Miller thus abandons the ‘aesthetics of flags and fists’ from previous years, allowing for his photographs to adapt a more humanistic approach. These images are calmer, more sentimental and evident of a certain nostalgia. Unlike Miller’s struggle photographs – with their dictating, fast-paced messages - these images are permitted to resonate in the mind of the viewer as they page through the hopeful narrative of Reality Bites.

Three changes thus comes to be revealed in Miller’s later work:  Firstly, his subject matter has changed from politically motivated violence to humanistic representations of social transformation.  Secondly - without the immediacy associated with the former news photographs - the latter documentations were set in a less stressful working environment in which Miller had time to negotiate with his subjects allowing them to participate in the manner in which they are represented, as well as the time to consider his preferred technical and visual settings – whether this is composition, lighting, pose or background. And lastly, as consequence of the resonating characteristic of these photographs, the viewer has been offered a more respectful role in the ‘triangular relationship’ existing between subject, photographer and audience, demanding for him or her to form their own analysis of the image and accept its inherent ‘complexity and contradiction’. Therefore the viewer is given the chance to contemplate the image without being given immediate, prescribed readings such is was the case in Miller’s earlier news photographs.

With this in mind one can view Miller’s later – perhaps even more controversial – projects, with better understanding. Rebel Chic was an exhibition held at ART Gallery in Cape Town in 2007 displaying photographs Miller took of the Ugandan Resistance Army rebels. The photographs take on the form of portraits. With their cocky poses, flashy sunglasses, designer t-shirts and ammunition for props, the rebels seem to have played a big role in the creation of their individual portraits.  According to Art Times, Miller - by negotiating an intimate relationship with the rebels in order to convince them to pose for him – offers the gallery attendee ‘a peek into the curious rule of the jungle’. The democratic approach Miller adapts towards his subjects allows him to create a more humanistic portrayal of them, revealing to the viewer the manner through which these men cope with the dangerous environment they find themselves in.

Even though there evidently exists a stark stylistic contrast between the ‘Then’ and the ‘Now’ stages of Miller’s career, his commitment towards his subject has remained intact. Both phases speak of his inclination to help create and serve a better society – whether on political terms, such as was the case in his struggle photographs - or on social terms revealing the aftermath and recovery of political struggle and war - as is evident in his more contemporary work. Even though Miller’s post-Apartheid photographs fail to reveal any deliberate political proclivity, both collections are aimed at visually uplifting his subjects - always representing them as ‘rightful human beings’.

One can now understand why art historian Michael Godby so strongly opposes the assumption, that by migrating to the art gallery, the South African photojournalist has deliberately sacrificed photographic content for aesthetic values and as consequence has fallen into the trap of modernist objectification of the subject. Instead, he argues, the same commitment that fuelled their earlier work is still present in their contemporary, gallery-exhibited photographs, but that they have now been forced to adapt new subject matter that complies to a new institutional context.  Beauty – which has previously been regarded as opposed to any form of meaning making – has now been adapted by photojournalists like Miller as perhaps ‘the most eloquent vehicle they have’ to articulate their ‘urgent’ social message. Therefore, instead of compromising on content, Miller - by placing his works in a gallery – was able to reinsert his visual message into public rhetoric. The current media is hung-up with action.  Social messages like Miller’s do not reach the public eye through the media.  Therefore alternative routes - even if ethically perilous - had to be explored.

‘Committed art’ was the term used to describe the photographic material that entered the gallery in the mid-1990’s – an art that was neither centred around the photographer, nor the gallery itself, but rather focussed on the human subject and the act of public engagement. It could then be argued that, not only did Miller have to compromise in the form of stylistic change, but the art gallery also had to compromise its rigid principle of hosting purely modernist aesthetics. After 1990, South African galleries are said to have become much more receptive of the medium of photography, broadening its visual field from strictly fine art photography such as the work of Jo Ractliffe and Penny Siopis, to include more works of the newly introduced ‘committed art’.

The consequence of this stylistic and institutional transformation on the work of the young contemporary photographer is perhaps a somewhat blurred perspective of the practice itself. This is what artist Jo Ractliffe calls the ‘maddeningly awkward space between otherness and real, between art and documentary journalism’. Contemporary photographer Dave Southwood adapts exactly this photographic persona through his usage of a wide variety of styles and subject matter. Southwood shifts the focus of his camera back and forth between documentary material and fine art, sometimes even blending the two practices - similar to what was evident in Miller’s more recent work Rebel Chic.

After ten years of documenting the Milnerton Market, Southwood becomes an almost invisible presence on the scene. He succeeds in creating an intimate relationship with market authorities, product sellers and regular browsers, giving him access to the more intimate aspects of this strange cultural environment. The collection consists of portraits, group shots and still lives. His subjects participate in the project by designing their own poses and even writing their own captions to the photographs. In this way Southwood’s documentation – similar to that of Miller’s – adapts a democratic relationship between himself and his subjects. These photographs also serve as commentary on a certain local, cultural movement. It could be defined as a ‘study’ of the behaviour, habits and physique of a certain South African social ‘type’. With this in mind the photographs - aimed at being published in the form of a coffee table book - adapt an almost ethnographic character. Documentation and art – in their most vivid forms – merged together in Southwood’s photographs to create a unique body of ‘committed art’.

Southwood also documents sex workers in Swaziland, prisoner inmates at Pollsmoor and Valkenberg Mental Hospital patients for publications like the New York based Colors magazine. Colors is published in over 40 countries world-wide in four different languages. The magazine is aimed at introducing equality of cultures to the world by motivating discussion among young people of social themes that have been overlooked by mainstream media. It makes use of photography as its main tool for expressing these socially developmental ideals - regarding it as the most ‘expressive’ and ‘immediate’ medium to achieve its far reaching goal.

Southwood was also commissioned by social development magazine The Big Issue to do a documentation on the movement of supermarket trolleys in and around Cape Town. This project focuses on the extent to which consumer culture blends into the realms of normal city life, becoming an almost invisible extension of our everyday life.  By following in the tracks of the these trolleys, one is exposed to the varying and unbalanced social hierarchy of South African culture. From consumer driven city centres to the commodity deprived social peripheries, this culturally iconic object becomes a metaphor of the fragility of our capitalist society. This project – while still a documentation of social behaviour – adapts a more abstract character. It could be argued that this project almost oversteps the verge of popular art, calling to mind Andy Warhol’s 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket. 

‘Nothing in Particular’ was a solo exhibition – presumably one of Southwood’s most popular - held at the Bell-Roberts Art Gallery in 2002. For this exhibition Southwood presented a collection of ‘richly coloured and finely articulated’ photographs of iconic South African locations such as the Durban beachfront and the swimming pool at the Sea Point pavilion in Cape Town. At first the collection of images seems insignificant - almost quotidian.  The lack of commentary makes them seem even more irrelevant to the gallery context. What Southwood achieves however is to take his viewer on a – perhaps originally suspicious - trip down memory lane. Standing in front of the image the viewer might experience either nostalgia, sadness, claustrophobia or joyfulness depending on which memories these familiar locations call to mind. Southwood forces the viewer to enter into a memory play with the images, pushing him to confront ‘the conditions of his own existence’. By showing the present Southwood persuades his viewer to confront his past. One viewer remarked that the images reminded her of all the social institutions that categorizes South African society.

The title and subject matter of Southwood’s exhibition calls to mind some of David Goldblatt’s work, which Southwood agrees, was one of his leading inspirations. Since 1990’s, Goldblatt – also an ex-struggle photographer - has received great recognition from the art world for his projects on the ideological constructions of South Africa. Goldblatt documented South Africa’s political history by photographing its various architectural structures. ‘Structures’, he argued ‘declare quite nakedly...what manner of people built them, and what they (those people) stood for’. Goldblatt, could be argued, to have been the forerunner of the phenomenon experienced in the contemporary South African art world. He was the first to blend architecture and documentary - the merger of art and documentary journalism. Southwood’s work serves as proof of this statement.  In his exhibition ‘Nothing in Particular’ Southwood strictly follows Goldblatt’s example: He allows his viewer to reflect on and question the social conditions of his existence by exhibiting photographs in a gallery of iconic South African locations. A documentation of social circumstance through physical location. The perfect blend of documentation and art.

In conclusion it could be argued that Eric Miller and others alike, have - through their stylistic transformation – altered the way we look at photojournalism. They created a doorway through which documentary photography could enter the world of aesthetics. Photographers from the 1980’s have initiated a two-way compromise between the art gallery and the medium of documentary photography creating a unique style in South African photography – one that is stylistically flexible. By retiring from an uninterested media world and by adapting to certain aesthetic regulations, these photojournalists found an alternative route for reaching public rhetoric.  Photographers like Miller, Goldblatt and Guy Tillim have thus paved the way for the contemporary photographer like Southwood, to operate in an art world which is liberated from the extreme aesthetic divisions of the past. The contemporary photographer is now allowed to roam freely in the realms of the aesthetic world as ‘undercover’ mouthpieces for a healthier society.