By Ted Carmichael 

Peter Magubane's books Women of South Africa and Vanishing Cultures of South Africa each document a different period of his photography. The first, Women , consists of photos taken from the 1940's to 1993. The second, Vanishing Cultures of South Africa , consists of photos taken over a period of several years before 1998. The time frame is one of the differences between the books, another is the subjects Magubane tackles. Women is a historical document of people working to move their history in a certain direction, and the effects that period of history (the period of South African apartheid) had on a people. Vanishing Cultures was created after apartheid and documents men and women performing generations-old cultural traditions. Magubane photographs the subjects of Vanishing Cultures as if they stand outside of history: almost every photograph captures a moment that could have occurred many times over many years without any visual difference. Magubane's photography in Women is the opposite: every image is marked by the time period in which it was created, he makes his subjects inseparable from their history.

South Africa is the subject of both of these books, but Magubane creates two very different South Africas . Magubane is a photographer of great historical importance, and how he has changed the way he portrays his subject deserves to be closely examined, along with the artistic implications of that change. While he has stopped addressing the directions and effects of the movement of history within his works history in South Africa has not stopped. Apartheid has ended, but AIDS, poverty, and many other crises continue to devastate South Africa and effect its peoples' lives and history. Of course Magubane cannot be expected to deal with every possible theme in each of his works, and of course he has the right to change the themes he is interested in. Why he makes these changes and how these changes affect his art are still valuable questions.

Some pictures in these two books that share similar themes with each other show how the ending of apartheid has freed Magubane artistically. In Women there is a picture of a black nanny looking after a white child (33). The subject of this picture is the relationship between the nanny and the child. Magubane is not able to show this relationship without without also showing the history of apartheid that surrounds it: the child sits on a bench marked ‘Europeans Only', the nanny on a bench behind her. In Vanishing Cultures there is also a photo of a relationship between a young and an old person (165). In this an old man clasps his young grandson's hand and looks up at him. This photo explores many themes. The grandfather is lying down, he is old and looks weak and tired. He is looking up at the small boy who stands high above him. The grandfather grips his grandsons hand tightly, the boy holds his grandfather's without the same emotion. It is a powerful photograph and much could be interpreted from it, but none of those would be the historical context. That remains outside the vision of the photo.

A second picture in Women shows the relationship between an older woman, who is pictured, and her husband, who is not (93). Her husband's absence is central to the picture. She is a widow at her husbands funeral, her husband is Nobel Peace Prize-winner Chief Albert Luthuli. The “verdict at the inquest of this great leader's death- that he had been ‘struck by a train'- was never accepted by the Luthuli family” (93). His wife is crying, surrounded by other mourners, and the picture is a meditation on the tragic effects apartheid has on relationships. A picture of an older couple in Vanishing Cultures is free of historical import. The picture is of the grey haired man putting his face to his smiling wife's face, the sun strikes both of them and old age seems to be the perfect peace if experienced with the right person (164).

Looking at how Magubane deals with the subject of relationships in the two books makes the difference between the books clear. Throughout the photos in Women relationships and all other subjects cannot be explored without also exploring the history they exist in. After apartheid, in Vanishing Cultures Magubane finds himself freed to explore relationships without looking at the historical context. While it would no doubt be very interesting to see these relationships in the context of the history of the ‘new South Africa ' it can also be wonderful to see how he approaches his subjects without the baggage of history.

While these two photographs from Vanishing Cultures are representative of the photos in the book because of their lack of historical context, they do not deal with the subject that Magubane addresses in the vast majority of the photos: cultural traditions. Where the emotional significance of the photo of the grandfather and grandson and older couple are rich, how the traditions Magubane documents are emotionally significant to the participants in the traditions is unclear. Magubane is eloquent with his camera, and in these photos easily shows the visual beauty of the customs. Those who have no knowledge of the customs outside of these photographs cannot absolutely know that to the participants the customs are meaningful for more than just their visual beauty, but it is probably not a risk to assume that they are. Magubane fails to show with his photographs whatever these other meanings might be.

Magubane's photography in Women does not share this same weakness. The photographs he took during apartheid manage to accomplish documenting a subject that a people experience (South African apartheid) while simultaneously being universally resonant works of art. The universal resonance strengthens the quality of his documentation of the subject.

Looking back at the picture of the black nanny and the white child will help clarify how this works. This picture has the characteristic that ties the entire book together: it analyzes apartheid through images. Its other subject, more unique in this book, is the relationship between the white child and the black nanny. The close relationship between the nanny and the child is shown by the nanny caringly fussing with the child's hair. This type of relationship, a loving one between an older person and a child who they care for, is without cultural boundaries, and any person looking at the picture would feel empathy with the nanny and child. Literally jutting between the bodies of the nanny and child the second subject arrives: the policies of apartheid. The bench they each lean against is one that has one side designated for Europeans only and the other, I assume, blacks or other non-Europeans. This unnatural and historical separation of a natural and universal relationship creates a picture which resonates because firstly, it shows that a particular political situation is wrong because of how it affects relationships, and secondly shows the tragedy of relationships being deformed in unnatural ways. One is a specific political resonance, the other a universal emotional resonance, the two weave together in a way that makes each resonance stronger.

The characteristic that ties Vanishing Cultures together is cultural traditions. On pages 106 and 107 are a series of pictures that exhibit cultural traditions. The difference in how Magubane captures his subject in these pictures versus how he captures his subject in the nanny and child picture is that here he sticks with absolute single-mindedness to a single subject. The movements of the tradition, the types of clothing used, the interactions between the people in the tradition are all captured, yet nothing outside the tradition is allowed in. This same movement is repeated throughout the book: only the traditions that have been unchanged for centuries are in these pictures. There are a few exceptions: people wearing modern glasses and clothes (111), a BMW (81), the picture of the old man and his grandson (165), the picture of the older couple (163), but their appearances are so few and far between they only seem odd and out of place. They do not manage to shed any light on the books main subject: traditions.

While the traditions themselves are shown in beautiful detail, the emotional meaning of these traditions for the participants is left to be guessed at. The equivalent would be if in order to document apartheid Magubane took a picture of the bench for whites only, but left out the nanny and child. The viewer sees the subject, but Magubane does not help him or her understand the subject. It is beautiful but lifeless, a strange idol the viewer does not have the tools to decipher.

In his photos of the apartheid state Magubane photographed both a people and a history, both relationships and politics. That he photographed both of these made each easier to understand: part of humanness is having a history, having a context within which to live. When taken out of this context, the subject remains remote and alien to anyone who has not experienced it first hand. This is the problem Magubane's documentation in Vanishing Cultures of South Africa faces and does not overcome. However, this leaves an opening for new South African photographers to enter into. Magubane's new photos do manage to convey these traditions beautifully, and it would be impossible to finish Vanishing Cultures without feeling a desire to know more about its subject. Hopefully one day a young and creative South African photographer who has learned the lessons of Magubane's apartheid-era photography will take this challenge on.