Unisa Press
Defiant Images
Photography and Apartheid South Africa
| Author: | Darren Newbury |
|---|---|
| Published: | November 11, 2009 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-86888-523-7 |
| Number of pages: | 365 |
| This book is not available in electronic format |
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About the book
‘This book is much more than just a discourse on photography in the land of apartheid. And it goes well beyond sophisticated debate on the artistic merits of images. While keeping the lens trained on the evolution of photography it plunges the reader into a sharp and evocative sociocultural history of a country in deep conflict.’ – Albie Sachs
Photography is often believed to ‘witness’ history or ‘reflect’ society, but such perspectives fail to account for the complex ways in which photographs are made and seen, and the variety of motivations and social and political factors that shape the vision of the world that photographs provide. This book develops a critical historical method for engaging with photographs of South Africa during the Apartheid period.
The author looks closely at the photographs in their original contexts and their relationship to the politics of the time, listens to the voices of the photographers to try and understand how they viewed the work they were doing, and examines the place of photography in a post-Apartheid era.
Table of content
Introduction
1 An African Pageant: Between Native Studies and Social Documentary
2 ‘A Fine Thing’: The African Drum
3 ‘Johannesburg Lunch-hour’: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision of Drum
4 An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage
5 An Aesthetic of Fists and Flags: Struggle Photography
6 ‘Lest We Forget’: Photography and the Presentation of History in the Post-apartheid Museum
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
Index