Defiant images
Subtitle: photography and apartheid South Africa
By: Darren Newbury ; foreword by Albie Sachs
Contributors: Sachs, Albie, 1935-
Publisher: Unisa Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Pretoria
Language: eng
Number of pages: 345
ISBN-13: 9781868885237
Subjects: Politics and government; Photojournalism; Blacks; Resistance to Government; Apartheid; Documentary photography; Pictorial works; History
Description: "Photography is often believed to witness history or reflect society, but such perspectives fail to account for the complex ways in which photographs get made and seen, and the variety of motivations and social and political factors that shape the vision of the world that photographs provide. This book develops a critical historical method for engaging with photographs of South Africa during the apartheid period. The author looks closely at the photographs in their original contexts and their relationship to the politics of the time, listens to the voices of the photographers to try and understand how they viewed the work they were doing, and examines the place of photography in a postapartheid era. Based on interviews with photographers, editors and curators, and through the analysis of photographs held in collections and displayed in museums, this research addresses the significance of photography in South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century"--Cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-331) and index.
Table of contents: title: 1. An African Pageant: Between Native Studies and Social Documentary; title: 2. 'A FineThing': The African Drum; title: 3. Johannesburg Lunch-hour: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision of Drum; title: 4. An Unalterable Blackness: Ernest Cole's House of Bondage; title: 5. An Aesthetic of Fists and Flags: Struggle Photography; title: 6 Lest We Forget: Photography and the Presentation of History in the Post-apartheid Museum.