‘struggle photography’, black-and-white documentary and activist photography that emerged during the political mobilizations of the 1980s in South Africa, when the camera was seen as a cultural weapon of struggle against apartheid. An important landmark was the 1982 Culture and Resistance Festival held in Gaberone, Botswana, soon followed by the formation of the Afrapix Collective (later Agency).
The 1980s work built on important precedents from previous decades. Ernest Cole (1940-90) had documented the working and living conditions of the 1960s in his remarkable House of Bondage (1967); Peter Magubane and others had photographed political events from Sharpeville onwards in the 1960s. The Soweto Uprising of 1976 produced a spate of protest images by press photographers. Sam Nzima's published photograph of Hector Peterson, the first child to die from a police bullet in the student protests of June 1976, became the icon of the South African struggle. It attained the status of a South African pietà, signifying state brutality and the sacrifice of the innocents. Nzima himself was never properly credited for this photograph. Security police seized his negatives and drove him into hiding for many years. Nzima's case points to the dual condition of opportunity and shutdown which the period 1976-94 offered to photographers, and how black photographers often experienced this in more extreme ways than their white counterparts.
Afrapix founder members such as Omar Badsha (b. 1945), Paul Weinberg, Cedric Nunn, and Peter Mackenzie argued that photographers needed to go beyond the 1970s and provide in-depth views of ordinary lives. But as the United Democratic Front formed, with massive consequences, in the mid-1980s, many new photographers took up positions on the barricades. Funerals, marches, and political meetings, with youths and labour unions doing the toyi-toyi, became familiar genres, especially in the quest to portray positive struggle as opposed to negative victimization. Amongst the new generation of photographers to emerge within Afrapix were Lesley Lawson, Rafik Mayet, Jeeya Rajgopaul, Paul Alberts, Chris Ledochowski (b. 1956), Paul Grendon, Rashid Lombard, Santu Mofokeng (b. 1956), Guy Tillim (b. 1962), Gideon Mendel, Anna Zieminski, Eric Miller, and others. Afrapix was behind two important exhibitions and books, South Africa: The Cordoned Heart (1986) and Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa (1989), as well as contributions to Staffrider magazine. While political and market pressure to represent resistance, repression, and near-civil war in the cities was a fact of life and gave rise to the so-called Bang-Bang Club of the early 1990s, the documentary work of several key Afrapix photographers goes beyond straight ‘struggle’ paradigms. Badsha's work in Kwazulu-Natal, Ledochowski's on the Cape Flats, Nunn's on family bloodlines, Mofokeng's on township and spiritual life, all indicate sustained social and cultural projects that reflect on their own aesthetic.
Afrapix foundered in the early 1990s as South Africa's international isolation ended, heralded by the worldwide photographic feeding frenzy when Nelson Mandela was released in February 1990. But the legacy of ‘struggle photography’ is apparent in the continued practice of politicized documentary. This now attempts a more dialogic approach, strikingly apparent in the recent HIV/AIDS photography of Gideon Mendel (Broken Landscape) and others such as Fanie Jason.
— Patricia HayesPatricia Hayes
Bibliography
- Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Eng. edn. 1999)
- Marinovich, G., and Silva, J., The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (2000)
