After Apartheid: 10 South African Documentary Photographers.

The starting point of the exhibition After Apartheid: 10 South African Documentary Photographers (Fig. 1) (1) was Paul Weinberg's expression of the concern felt by his generation of documentary photographers about the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and other political organizations. While, politically and personally, they obviously welcomed this event as the culmination of the struggle with which they had identified, nevertheless, as professional photographers, they recognized that these changes would have profound effects on their future careers (Weinberg 1991).

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Paradoxically, for documentary photographers who had worked for the political transformation of the early 1990s, one of the consequences of their success was a significant drop in demand for their work. For years, young South African photographers had been used to supplying local and international networks with images. After 1990, and more particularly after the extraordinary success of the first democratic elections in 1994, the country became less newsworthy and world attention focused elsewhere. As a consequence, some photographers, such as Lesley Lawson, simply abandoned the medium and turned to other forms of creative expression; some, such as Gideon Mendel, Ingrid Hudson, and Wendy Schwegman, left the country and now return only as occasional visitors; and others, such as Guy Tillim, while still domiciled in South Africa, find much of their work overseas or elsewhere in Africa.

On the other hand, political liberation has brought freedom to South Africa's photographers in the same way it has to other sectors of society. Thus, Omar Badsha has had his passport returned, ending many years of restricted movement, and George Hallett has returned from years of exile in Europe. Moreover, the new possibilities of international travel and the ending of the cultural boycott have seen South African arts, including photography, take an important part on the world stage. Major exhibitions of African photography, such as "In/Sight" at the Guggenheim in New York (Bell et al. 1996) and the "Revue Noire" exhibition in Paris and elsewhere (Revue Noire 1998), have afforded a prominent place to South African work, present as well as past. South Africa has participated in the last few "Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine" at Bamako (Njami 2001), the first "Photofesta: Primeiros Encontros Internacionais de Fotografia" at Maputo (Associacao Mocambicana de Fotografia 2002), and has instituted its own biennale, "The Month of Photography," in Cape Town (Grundlingh, G. 2000 and 2002). (2) David Goldblatt has been honored by a major retrospective traveling to New York, Barcelona, and elsewhere (Coetzee et al. 2002); and he, George Hallett, and Santu Mofokeng showed together in the "Rhizomes" exhibition in Oslo (Jantjes 2000). Guy Tillim has been awarded the prestigious DaimlerChrysler Award, which has exhibited his work in Germany as well as South Africa (DaimlerChrysler South Africa 2004). Exhibitions such as "Democracy's Images," in Umea, Sweden (Lundstrom and Pierre 1998); "Liberated Voices" in New York (Herreman 1999); "The Short Century," in Munich and elsewhere (Enwezor 2001); "Africas: The Artist and the City," in Barcelona (Subiros 2001); "Lines of Sight," in Cape Town and Bamako (Grundlingh, K. 2001); and currently, "Afrika Remix," starting in Dusseldorf before traveling to London, Paris and Tokyo (Njami 2004), among others, have all showcased South African photographers, on their own or with artists working in other media. Moreover, most of these exhibitions are accompanied by major catalogues that confirm the status of these photographers while spreading their reputation still further. Similarly, Badsha, Goldblatt, Tillim, Weinberg, Lien Botha, Alf Kumalo, Peter Magubane, Gideon Mendel, Santu Mofokeng, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Jo Ractliffe, and Jurgen Schadeburg have either published major books on their own work or have been the subject of books. Photographers such as Goldblatt, Mthethwa, and Tillim have had their work bought by major international collections; and they, and others, have had successful commercial shows in South Africa and overseas.

Liberation has affected the form of South African photography as well as its practice. Although they were generally unwilling to talk in these terms, photographers documenting South Africa's struggle for freedom clearly developed styles that were both fully legible and highly expressive in their representation of oppression and resistance. Thus, Struggle photographers whose work appeared in the collections The Cordoned Heart (Badsha 1986) and Beyond the Barricades (Hill and Harris 1989) would introduce such expressive devices as strong tonal contrasts, dramatic perspectives, sudden changes in scale, and a sense of violent movement--a movement that is sometimes implied to continue beyond the limits of the picture format. As well as communicating the urgency of the moment, this form of expression had the effect of attributing a sense of agency to the subject of the photograph. Since 1990, however, South African documentary photographers, both those who had been active as Struggle photographers and those entering the field for the first time, have moved away from what Lesley Lawson, in the video Images in Struggle, called the "aesthetics of flags and fists" (Mayibuye Centre dir. 1990). In the same 1990 video, Santu Mofokeng explained that he was looking for "something more," in effect, how to communicate the humanity of his subjects, the fact that they were like other people and simply wanted the same things. Thus, where Struggle photography had tended to be urgent and declamatory, dictating specific readings of the image, photographers emerging from this maelstrom wanted to create a more resonant, complex image of their subjects. In terms of subject matter, photographers now sought out less immediate, less obvious activity. In terms of style, they tended to refuse centralized, unitary compositions and violently expressive forms in favor of complex compositions involving competing subjects or the distribution of interest over the visual field. In this way, photographers seemed to express a changed relationship to time, both in the suggestion of a greater familiarity between photographer and subject and in the sense that it should take the viewer time to discover layers or nuances of meaning in the image.

The demand that the viewer should work to make sense of an image and accept complexity and contradiction as part of its meaning refers the experience of looking at photographs to the conditions of contemplating works of art in a gallery. It is for precisely this reason that photographers who, until recently, would have preferred to publish their work in magazines, newspapers, and even posters, have aspired to have their work exhibited in art galleries. In this ambition photographers are not sacrificing content in favor of aesthetic form: Rather, they are using the gravity of the gallery context to ensure the lasting significance of their work.

From his involvement in the Beyond the Barricades generation of Struggle photographers, Guy Tillim has used photography in order to further a cause. But if his early South African work was to this extent partisan, Tillim's work since 1994 in Africa and elsewhere has tended to move from the direct representation of conflict to an attempt to capture the effects of war on those societies that have to endure it. Thus, in his photographs of Kuito, the Angolan town that changed hands several times during the extended civil war before the death of Jonas Savimbi in 2002, Tillim seems to have deliberately avoided representation of conflict and even of direct military activity. Instead, the experience of war is communicated through the destroyed and pockmarked buildings (Fig. 2). Tillim's technique here of distributing signs of violence all over the visual field suggests a lunatic dimension to the extent and intensity of the destruction. In the Kuito photographs there are relatively few human figures and those that are represented, in whole or in part, seem to engage with the madness of their predicament.

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Tillim spoke for a time of returning to Angola with a large-format camera in order to better document the devastated fabric of this wasteland. Although he was unable to do so, this intention underlines his ambition to capture not the actuality of war, nor even its experience, but rather something that, from its appalling duration and extent, might properly be called the condition of war. Similarly, Tillim's subsequent photographs of refugees at Kunhinga appear to show the emotional rather than physical scars of war in the graphic representation of loss and bewilderment (see also Badsha 2002).

In terms of recognition in an art gallery context both locally and overseas, perhaps Zwelethu Mthethwa has enjoyed more success since 1994 than any other South African photographer, with the possible exception of David Goldblatt (Zaya et al. 1999). Mthethwa was a student in Cape Town and the US during the Struggle years, but his work of the 1990s may still be seen as a reaction to the photography of that time. Mthethwa considers that the township residents who were the subjects of so many Struggle photographers were twice victimized--once by the political and social oppression of apartheid and again by their one-dimensional representation in the black-and-white Struggle images in the media. In his representation of township dwellers, Mthethwa uses color with the express purpose of restoring what he calls the dignity of his subjects. Moreover, while much Struggle photography would tend to use the subject as evidence in someone else's argument, Mthethwa deliberately introduces the sense of negotiation between subject and photographer in the construction of his image. Mthethwa's working method, once he has identified likely subjects, is to invite them to prepare themselves for their portrait image--by changing their clothes, tidying the room, etc. Thus, as far as the subject is concerned, Mthethwa's photograph is simply a portrait, a reading that is confirmed by his practice of presenting each subject with a copy.

In the art gallery context, however, with labels reading simply "Untitled," Mthethwa's photographs are a great deal more than just portraits. In fact, critics have suggested a number of different readings, involving poverty, fantasy, globalization, and so on. But Mthethwa himself has always insisted, on the one hand, on the idea of dignity and, on the other, the significance of color. Reference to Mthethwa's pastel paintings, where color is manifestly the vehicle of transcendent spiritual energy, suggests that he seeks out bright color in shack dwellers' costumes and decor for his photographs precisely in order to attribute a similar spiritual resonance to these materially impoverished subjects. For Mthethwa, apparently, spirituality is an essential component of full human dignity and he finds it present in abundance in his chosen subject matter.

In fact, research for the exhibition showed that since 1990, an extraordinary number of South African photographers have concerned themselves with spiritual subject matter. In addition to Mthethwa, who actually created a separate photo essay of his township portraits on people in one form or another of religious costume, several photographers have addressed the theme of religion in contemporary South African society. Perhaps the most influential is Santu Mofokeng who, like Mthethwa, recognizes the profound significance of the spiritual in the lives of ordinary people: His Chasing Shadows photo essay is an extraordinarily lyrical record of religious services in the vast caves outside Clarens. Andrew Tshabangu and Tracey Derrick, whose work is represented elsewhere in this show, have also worked with religious subject matter, also with a view to affirming the importance of spiritual as well as material considerations. But perhaps the most extensive treatment of the theme is Paul Weinberg's The Moving Spirit, an ongoing collection of images of the many different religious traditions coexisting in the region of his home in Durban.

Weinberg's turn to religious subject matter represents one of the more radical changes in direction of any photographer in the ten years of South Africa's democracy, for Weinberg has long been the South African photographer most fully committed to the idiom of documentary photography in the material sense of the project. Weinberg's recent retrospective, Travelling Light, shows his commitment over the years to the liberation struggle as well as such political causes as land reform and the plight of the Khoisan communities in Southern Africa (Weinberg 2004). In these projects Weinberg has tended to work in an expressive style to direct the reading of his image. In his photo essay on the annual Shembe Church festival from The Moving Spirit (Fig. 3) as, indeed, in Nadine Hutton's similar images of the followers of Isaiah Shembe processing in their separate age and gender groups up the holy mountain to be blessed by their leader, the photographer uses expressive forms to communicate the excitement of the occasion. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the religious intensity of the event, the stylistic vocabulary of strong diagonals, tonal contrasts, and radical perspectives puts one in mind of the formal methods and ecstatic quality of certain European Baroque artists. Interestingly, the two photographers arrive at similar stylistic conclusions from very different backgrounds; while Weinberg has always identified with the documentary project, Nadine Hutton has developed her expressive style working as a photojournalist with the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian newspaper.

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Ecstatic joy is also an important ingredient in the work of George Hallett, notably in his photograph "First Encounter" which was used in the exhibition to introduce the theme of liberation in post-apartheid South Africa (Fig. 4). Hallett's photograph depicts the spontaneous delight of three women on seeing Nelson Mandela, as well as Mandela's joyful response to his admirers that became a hallmark of his presidency. But joy is evident in much of Hallett's work. Indeed, for a man who endured exile for such a long time and who was always very much aware of the brutal consequences of apartheid oppression, it is extraordinary how lyrical Hallett's view of the world is. In the photographs drawn from his major photo essay on the Cape Town suburb of Bo-Kaap, Hallett sympathetically documents the life of this formerly marginalized community, underlining the integral part that religion plays in the social life of the people. In his treatment of light in this photo essay, Hallett, like Santu Mofokeng, suggests that time-honored ritual also integrates the community into some larger natural order.

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Andrew Tshabangu has also documented religious practices in such photo essays as Portrait of the Spirit and On Sacred Ground. His series Joubert Park Food Sellers, which depicts women preparing food over smoking braziers in evening light filtered through trees at a taxi rank in Central Johannesburg, creates an unworldly atmosphere in the delicate effects of light and smoke. In this essay, Tshabangu discovers beauty in the unlikely context of an industrialized landscape but also, like Mofokeng in Chasing Shadows and Berni Searle in her Vapour series, invites the spectator to look beyond material form and recognize a spiritual presence. Tshabangu's other series in the exhibition, Rural Labor, Northern Province, also celebrates the mystical quality of light among other natural forms. Indeed, in certain of his photographs he renders light as an element that not only reveals forms but, like photography itself, somehow brings them into being. In this series, Tshabangu suggests a ritualistic relationship between labor and the land that it works.

Tracey Derrick seems to work with a similar sense of the sacralistic nature of the elements. In her recent photo essay Liquid Life, Derrick has looked back at her career and noticed how often water has featured in her work. Pulling these images together, she comments on the presence of water in the human body as in nature generally, and how people seem to be drawn to water, not simply to sustain life but to somehow identify with an essential life force. Thus, in the exhibition's selection of photographs from Basic Necessities, a photo essay on Cape Town sex workers, Derrick featured water in a seemingly ritualistic depiction of cleansing. Moreover, her depiction of the human body, for example the joining of hands in a therapeutic massage, suggests a healing potential of touch that is quite distinct from conventional medical treatment.

Jenny Gordon's photograph "27 April 1994" was the second of the two images chosen to introduce the post-apartheid theme of the exhibition, and in fact served as the poster and invitation for the show (Fig. 5). In contrast to the sheer joy of George Hallett's photograph of ordinary South Africans responding to the presence of Nelson Mandela in their midst, Gordon's photograph of black workers preparing themselves to vote is a sober account of the pride and responsibility of the new democracy. In this group portrait, and in her ongoing photo essay of Intimate Portraits, which also forms part of the exhibition, Gordon is clearly interested in the way ordinary people present themselves to the camera. But her close scrutiny of a face the physiognomy, the form, and the expression--offers little help in the interpretation of the image. Indeed, her dispassionate style and monumental scale appear to validate the ordinary while privileging the simple act of looking.

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Dave Southwood is also concerned to hold up images of the commonplace without commentary and without any form of direction. His series Nothing in the Particular uses the transparent sense of color and a large-format negative to present with extraordinary lucidity the visual fabric of our world (Fig. 6). In his representation of the South African landscape, Southwood seeks out the banal and the quotidian in order to let the environment speak for itself. Southwood's refusal to provide overt narrative, what is normally referred to as subject matter, precludes judgment, even comment on the scene, and viewers are subtly forced to confront the conditions of their own existence.

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In these works, particularly, but I think in the exhibition generally, there is a respect demonstrated for the act of looking that changes fundamentally the viewer's relationship to the image. In contrast to the polemics of Struggle photography, the new generation of South African photographers appears to trust that the viewer is able to decide upon issues without being led by the nose. In this transformation, many photographers have moved from an understanding of beautiful form as inherently opposed to the communication of meaning to a recognition that beauty may be perhaps the most eloquent vehicle they have. But while many photographers are migrating to the reflective conditions of art galleries in order to encourage complex and resonant readings of their work, some are using these hallowed spaces for directly political ends.

Gideon Mendel's work on HIV/AIDS, which is understood by many to be the new South African struggle, is a significant example of this trend (Fig. 7). Despite the overtly political nature of this work, the aesthetic and humanitarian qualities of Mendel's photography have won him ready acceptance in art gallery contexts (Mendel 2001). Recently, Mendel has begun to use such spaces as yet another medium through which he can get his message out. His opening functions and book launches have been turned into activist rallies, which become newsworthy events in themselves; his collaboration with AIDS organizations, for example the Treatment Action Campaign and Medecins sans Frontiers, brings a noisy new public to the gallery spaces. Moreover, Mendel's own recent projects--on the one hand, making portraits by inviting people to represent themselves directly or indirectly against an informal frame of black tape and exhibiting this image with the subject's own statement and, on the other hand, making enlarged contact strips of people's daily activities--seem to challenge the power relationships of conventional portraiture and documentary photography respectively, as his use of the gallery itself is intended to disturb establishment practice.

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[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

1. The exhibition started at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cape Town, as part of the "Month of Photography," April 2002, before moving to the University Art Gallery, University of Stellenbosch, in May 2002 and "Photofesta," Maputo, in October/November 2002. This paper is an adaptation of the introductory talk given at the opening of the exhibition in Stellenbosch.

(2.) Note in the second edition Svea Josephy, "Post-apartheid South African Photography," pp. 5-17.

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--.2002. Amulets and Dreams: War, Youth, and Change in Africa. Pretoria: South African History Online.

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