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PETER MAGUBANE |
| Although Peter Magubane is internationally renowned as a photo-journalist,
whose photographs mesmirized and captivated the attention and the imagination
of the world in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, in their chilling
depiction of the crisis and downfall of the political system of apartheid,
the other Magubane the great modernist photographer is not acknowledged
or is too easily forgotten. More about the latter photographer later. One
abiding characteristic of Magubane, which his autobiographical essay in
Magubane’s South Africa (1978) emphasizes again and again, was his indomitable
spirit to succeed at any cost in achieving his poetic vision. In this fortitude
to bring into being new and unrealized things and process, Magubane was
similar to the other New African intellectual, the great poet Benedict Wallet
Bambata Vilakazi. Both the photographer and the poet were engaged in the
construction of civilizational modernity which H. I. E. Dhlomo characterizes
and measures with the following words: “The modern age is building the imposing
edifice of civilisation upon the firm pedestal set by our ancestors. Some
countries, owing to adverse geographical and climactic conditions have been
severed from civilizing agencies and influences, and people occupying them
are backward in the scale of civilisation. In South Africa civilisation
has wrought wonders. The Native’s march athwart the decades of European
contact has been a singular one, now rising in leaps and bounds and anon
checked by repressive laws. Several races in this and other countries were
not only decimated, but annihilated by coming in contact with Western Enlightenment,
displaying their inability to adapt themselves to the changes of environment,
of thought and life brought about by civilisation. The mere fact of the
survival and multiplication of the Bantu under changed and not very encouraging
conditions of European life proves, if proof is wanted, their being a great
and puissant nation, capable of development and advancement” (Bert [H. I.
E. Dhlomo], “Civilisation”, Ilanga lase Natal, October 11, 19, 1929). Displaying
cognisance of the complex understanding of this historical experience, Peter
Magubane’s photo-journalism is principally about the repressive and oppressive
aspect of modernity, what Walter Benjamin postulated as the barbaric underside
of modern civilization. Magubane’s autobiographical essay demarcates particular
historical landmarks: 1956, the march of over 30,000 women of all ethnic
and racial groups in Pretoria against women’s pass laws; 1960, the Sharpeville
Massacre, which put South Africa on a permanent crisis mode until its democratic
resolution in 1994; and 1976, the Soweto Uprising, which unbeknown to us,
announced the beginning of the end of apartheid. Among the twelve books
of photography he has published since taking up this art form beginning
in 1955 to the waning moments of the twentieth-century, four about photojournalism,
Magubane’s South Africa (1978), Black Childhood (1983), Soweto: The Fruit
of Fear (1986), and Women of South Africa: Their Fight for Freedom (1993),
are predominantly about the barbarism of modernity. Their searing images
are extraordinary. The poeticism of photographic form are not alien to them.
Two books are about the throes or dialectic of struggle between tradition
and modernity: Soweto Speaks (1979) and Vanishing Cultures of South Africa
(1998). Perhaps the book that seeks to convey and depict the triumph of
the civilizational culture of modernity is Nelson Mandela: Man of Destiny
(1996). Across this triangulated periodization of the historically new,
beyond the barbarism and civilization of modernity, two themes are at the
center of Peter Magubane’s photographic imagination: childhood and motherhood.
It is through the articulation of these two themes that Magubane’s modernism
announces itself. It is necessary to recall for a moment that previous to
Peter Magubane’s entrance into the Drum school of photographers in the 1950s,
there was not much democratic tradition in South African photography. It
was not only Peter Magubane, together with Alf Khumalo, Bob Gosani, G. R.
Naidoo, Lionel Oostendorp and others, who established democratic traditions
in South African modernistic photography, they also forged the poetics of
modernism in this domain. Magubane inflects a particular vision of photographic
modernism.
[Here I would like to reproduce an essay on Peter Magubane written a decade ago in the South African community exile journal based in West Berlin where the author was then residing: Awa-Finnaba: An African Literary and Cultural Journal, no. 2, March 1988] THE PHOTOGRAPHIC VISION OF PETER MAGUBANE The illiterate of the
future will be the people who know nothing A photograph arrests
the flow of time in which the event Probably in post-apartheid South Africa, it may seem self-evident that Bob Gosani, Jurgen Schadeberg, Lionel Oostendorp, Peter Magubane , and a few others, formed the first major school of South African photography. One here can only suppose that the simultaneity of ther existence within a particular moment will not be evaluated as critical as the very different reactions to the particularity of that period in their photographs. What would be important then would be history, which is a product of praxis, and not destiny, which is the outcome of the incident of birth. If the visual imagination of Peter Magubane and that of Bob Gosani is in contrast to the visual imagination of Juergen Schadeberg and David Goldblatt, this has much more to do with the politics of division which reign supreme in our country today, rather than with the poetics of light, form, composition and plasticity, which should be arbiters in matters concerning photography. Because of the ideology and philosophy of apartheid there is a serious danger of politics subordinating poetics to itself in evaluating the creative forms of the imagination. That politics, particularly Marxist politics, should play an important role in the evaluation of artistic forms in South Africa is beyond dispute. The real danger lies in subordinating artistic forms to the politics of a particular moment. Ewhat is much more central is the poetics of artistic forms within different political and historical contexts. The reading of the poetics in the politically determined photography of Bob Gosani can hardly be expected to reveal the same compositional space, social imagination, density of figuration and structuring of light as that that will be possible on the elimination of the class and political consequences of the philosophy of apartheid. Then, when apartheid would have succumbed, it would not be difficult
to appreciate, beyond the politics of the present, Magubane’s characterization
of Gosani as having been a truly outstanding photographer: Anyone who has seriously looked at some of Gosani’s brilliant photographs of the cultural and physical destruction of Sophiatown in the 1950s, will not be tempted to dispute Peter Magubane’s judgement that he died before he had the opportunity and occasion to display his prodigious talent in its full splay. Unquestionably, Bob Gosani’s photography is an integral component of our cultural history. Besides indicating the passage of the mantle from one giant to another giant, Peter Magubane’s judgement equally points to the existence of a particular photographic tradition in South Africa. That tradition was the photo-journalism of the Drum magazine. Juergen Schadeberg was its godfather. But its outstanding practitioner was Bob Gosani. Peter Magubane and Bob Gosani formulated in their photographic praxis the poetic lineaments of this South African tradition. What aided the intensity of their photography was the emergence of the literary generation of Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, and other writers in the Drum magazine itself. The conjunction of photographic visuals and literary styles of unusual verveness within Drum had the paradoxical effect of purifying literary modes and photographic forms. Impurification was the declared enemy of Can Themba as of Peter Magubane. In South Africa, our predecessors were labouring to found and establish a tradition. Though there was an intense purification of styles and forms within Drum, this did not prevent the visual style of Magubane’s photography from having deep affinities with the literary style of Can Themba’s short stories, as much as Gosani’s photography could only imaginatively accompany the reportages of Henry Nxumalo. The adjectival style of Themba was the literary style of that literary generation. Its brilliance has been wqualled by a few writers in South Africa, stretching from Olive Schreiner to J. M. Coetzee. The photography ofv Peter Magubane aspires to the stylistics of Can Themba’s short stories. This is the reason why Magubane’s great photography transcends the photo-journalistic mode. The real master of Peter Magubane is Walker Evans rather than, for example, Robert Capa. The collapse of Life magazine commission for Peter Magubane and Nat Nakasa to undertake for three months a study of the American South was a momentous event, for had it taken place, it would have enabled Magubane to traverse the photographic world of Walker Evans, his unacknowledged master. The suicide of Nat Nakasa in New York City in 1965 terminated the project. It is absolutely fascinating to think what Magubane could have done with the African American culture in his photography, a culture that Evans has given supreme dignity and pride in his great photography. Another photographer to whom Magubane can be related in significant ways is Edward Weston. But this influence is complicated in many of its forms by complex mediatory factors. Consequently the true teacher of Magubane is Evans. In American photography from Lewis Hines to Paul Strand one can trace in clear progression and development of photography from documentation into full artistic expressiveness. It is perhaps the richness of this historical progression that has proven so attractive to Magubane. Whereas European photography, for instance of August Sander or Brassai, had to contend with, directly or indirectly, the richly textured forms of European artistic tradition, American photography fell on its new forms and believed in them in opening the new frontiers of the future. This makes evident that the myth of the frontier has been very fundamental to American artistic practices. It is the boundlessness of frontiers, which is one of the central themes of American photography, that has pulled Peter Magubane towards this photographic tyradition. Ian Jeffrey in his extraordinary book, Photography: A Concise History, makes the following prescient statement: “At the heart of Evan’s documentary is a belief in Everyman as an artist” (Thames and Hudson, London, 1981, p. 174). This could equally be said of Peter Magubane. The contrasts are just as crucial, whereas Evan’s American Photographs is a study in the formation of American society, Magubanes Sudafrika is a thesis on the disintegration of apartheid South Africa. Magubane’s photographs in the book conveying this theme are brilliant and very moving. It would be easy to show the greatness of Magubane as a photo-journalist, for he profoundly feels and knows the historical and cultural forces that justifiably necessitate the disintegration of the apartheid society. In this, he belongs to the same school as Bob Gosani. But the difference between them is equally great: Whereas Gosani is content to convey through his photography the catastrophic nature of South African society, particularly its effects on blacks, Indians and the so-called Coloureds, Magubane seeks to relate the inevitability of its destruction. The photographs of Peter Magubane that show the utter cruelty of the neo-fascist apartheid state have become world emblems of contemporary cruelty. The true genius of Magubane resides in those photographs that do not immediately relate to the political and social forces and relations that are galvanizing contemporary South Africa. In these photographs the true and real theme of Magubane’s ouevres comes through: the resiliency of womanhood. It is on this thematic landscape that his photographs do not suffer when compared with the best in the history of photography. These five or six photographs are great works of art. In them, Magubane’s deep love for women is conveyed with tremendous power. Motherhood and womanhood are examined in their complex and mysterious forms. These photographs and those about the innocence of childhood make Peter Magubane Africa’s first great photographer. With them, he has inaugurated a tradition of African photography. It is in these photographs that Magubane the true artist emerges and not in those which are the direct product of photojournalism. But it does not follow therefore that Magubane the photojournalist is insignificant. Childhood, in its state of innocence or purity, is interwoven with and into womanhood, in its moment of realization. For instance, the photograph of Mrs. Nomzamo Winnie Mandela with her daughter, conveys with tremendous power the reciprocal relation of dependency between mother and child. Mrs. Winnie Mandela is photographed by Peter Magubane with deep love and tragic longing. It is not by chance that Magubanes Sudafrika is partly dedicated to her. She is indeed the mother of the nation. The great theme of the reciprocal interaction between motherhood and childhood is captured in a series of great photographs.The three photographs with three different women in them looking over a sleeping baby, and a second one in which a mother or grandmother patching a torn boy’s shirt and wjo is bend over her legs, and a third one in which a woman (two other women are in the photograph) preparing a meal on the outside---are simply unsarpassable in their textural density, in their compositional structure, and the movement and projection of light in them. The orchestration of black and white in these photographs can only be a work of a master, a master definitely certain of his mastery of the movement of light on dark surfaces. The children in these pictures are a source of warmth, joy, happiness and passion. Perhaps in no other work of African art has womanhood (not merely African but universal) been given its deserved respectful place in human history, even surpassing the portrayal of womanhood in Sembene Ousmane’s Ceddo. The picture that really conveys Peter Magubane’s love for women is of an old woman looking through the windowless window of a mud hut. The glazed eyes show inner rectitude and painful wisdom, acquired at great costs. And the lines of old age possess an intense beauty. The intense beauty of this sad face cannot but be a great indictment of women’s oppression at the hands of men, in both capitalist and socialist systems, and in the whole lineage of human history. In contrast to this wonderful face, Magubane contra-poses faces of many children in exhilaration, joy, sadness, wonderment and puzzlement. For there are other photographs in Magubanes Sudafrika that though not possessing a singular continuous narrative structure, they nonetheless show Magubane’s perspecival visual eye. These photographs are profoundly pleasurable and exhilarating in their conveyance of the plasticity of movement, spacing, form and of depth. Magubane’s intuitive sense of the plasticity of spacing and movement is similar to that of the incomparable Polish film director Wojciech Has, though lacking the latter’s rich iconographic structure. The prodigious iconography present in Has’s films recalls the equally dense iconography in Walker Evan’s photographs of African American homes and barbershops. These few schematic remarks convey beyond doubt that Peter Magubane not only belongs to us South Africans, but is also a central compnent of international pictorial culture. If we have not dwelt much on those photographs that portray the arrogance of military power, the mindlessness of obedience to higher authority, the recklessness and savagery of repressive authority in South Africa, it is because they are already well-known all over the world. The absence of dating of the photographs in this book [1999: coming across for the first time the original English 1978 version of Magubane’s South Africa, I note that many of the photographs are the placed within the context of particular events, which makes it easier to extrapolate their dates; whereas the German version which was the only available copy from the Staatsbibliothek in West Berlin, decontextualized the political parameters] severely hinders the tracing of the progression of Magubane’s pictorial genius from the Congress of the People of 1955 (which formulated the Freedom Charter) to the Soweto Uprising of 1976. The genius of Peter Magubane is the genius of our people’s suffering which, to be sure, today in 1987 beckons the dawning of a new South Africa and the slow disappearance of the South Africa captured in Magubanes Sudafrika. |
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