Special issue: Documentary photography in South Africa

This volume covers a century of documentary photography in South Africa, starting with the First World War. Diana Wylie investigates in the introduction how documentary photography may differ from photojournalism and art. Distinctions between the three photographic categories – photojournalism, documentary photography, art – have become blurry in post-modern times, but in South Africa this blurriness is a post-1994 phenomenon: the urgency to document South African society disappeared only with the end of apartheid, freeing photographers to explore questions of a personal nature. Most of the photographs included in this issue were taken before 1994. Contents: Arteries of empire: on the geographical imagination of South Africa’s railway war, 1914/1915 (Giorgio Miescher); Visualizing the realm of a rain queen: the production and circulation of Eileen and Jack Krige’s Lobedu fieldwork photographs from the 1930s (Patricia Davison and George Mahashe); Reflections on the making of the ‘AmaBandla Ama-Afrika Exhibition’ (2011-2012): Martin West’s Soweto photographs (Paul Weinberg); Imagining National Unity: South African propaganda efforts during the Second World War (Suryakanthie Chetty); Lounge photography and the politics of township interiors: the representation of the black South African home in the Ngilima photographic collection, East Rand, 1950s (Sophie Feyder); Picturing the beloved country: Margaret Bourke-White, ‘Life Magazine’, and South Africa, 1949-1950 (John Edwin Mason); Portraits, publics and politics: Gisle Wulfsohn’s photographs of HIV/AIDS, 1987-2007 (Annabelle Wienand); Wounding apertures: violence, affect and photography during and after apartheid (Kylie Thomas); The ‘Nevergiveups’ of Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS: scholar-journalism-activism as social documentary (Eric Miller, Jo-Anne Smetherham and Jennifer Fish); ‘Native Work’: an artwork by Andrew Putter consisting of 38 portrait photographs (with photography by Hylton Boucher, Kyle Weeks and Andrew Putter) (Andrew Putter). [ASC Leiden abstract]