Cape Town - fifty years on
Prof Darren Newbury, Professor of Photography
I have recently curated an exhibition of photographs now on show at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford – People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952.
I selected the photographs from the extensive archive of Bryan Heseltine (1923-2008) whose work has not been exhibited for fifty years. Their discovery was one of those serendipitous moments. I came across twenty-five original exhibition prints in April 2009 when Hermione Harris, an Africanist scholar herself, approached me after I’d given a talk at a Museum of London seminar. She had salvaged the prints whilst working at the South African Institute of Race Relations in the 1960s and had kept them in London ever since. Neither of us knew anything about the photographer. But some detective work led me to the family and a treasure trove of negatives and I have been extending my research on them from there.
Heseltine grew up in the Eastern Cape, was educated in the UK at Dartington Hall School in the late 1930s but then returned to South Africa in 1940, where he eventually established his own photographic business. In the early 1950s Cape Town was a city in the midst of profound transformation. Added to the social challenges of rapid urbanisation were South Africa’s unique set of political tensions and conflicts. The Nationalist Party, elected in 1948, was just beginning to implement its policy of apartheid, which extended existing segregation with the ultimate aim of a society based on total racial separation.
The images selected for the exhibition offer a glimpse into the lives of South Africans who would feel the full force of apartheid through the 1950s and beyond. They were made in the late 1940s and early 1950s and provide a rich and intimate description of life in a number of townships and areas of the city: Windermere, the Bo-Kaap, District Six, Langa and Nyanga. The photographs belie the official image projected by the South African government. They show some of the dreadful housing conditions that existed on the periphery of the city, but also testify to the vibrancy of social and cultural life, including the work of street craftsmen, beer brewing, music and dance. The collection also includes some remarkably intimate portraits, illustrating the diverse styles and identities of Cape Town’s inhabitants. I include a link here to the BBC web site where I have provided commentary on some of the images. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-14150859
One of my aims for the exhibition was to draw attention to the history of the images and how they were taken up, first by the South African Institute of Race Relations, in the cause of social reform and campaigns for better housing for some of the city’s poorest inhabitants, Later, in England, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, brought the work into the ambit of the emerging anti-apartheid movement. This was an early attempt to find a visual language with which to represent apartheid South Africa to a British public.
Underlying the exhibition is the question of what it means for both British and South African audiences to look at the images now, in the post-apartheid era. I recently gave a talk at the Museum as part of their Saturday Spotlight series. I find it interesting to hear responses to the photographs, as much from non-specialists reacting to the human quality of the images as from those with a specific interest in questions of technique or historical context.
Together with the Museum’s Curator of Photographs Chris Morton, I have organised a symposium which is taking place on Wednesday 7 December. We will be joined by speakers from the USA and the Netherlands and will be considering a wider range of African photographic archives and practices, from documentary and official image-making to vernacular forms and artistic re-interpretation. Contributors will explore strategies for engaging with the diversity of African photographic archives from the perspectives of research and practice, including the representation of photographs from the colonial past for contemporary audiences.
Attendance at both the exhibition and the symposium is free of charge. Places for the symposium are filling up quickly but if you would like to attend please register via email: christopher.morton@prm.ox.ac.uk.
