Photobooks and South Africa: Notes on Works by Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt

Abstract

Photobooks are creative processes. Besides their historical contributions, they provide a platform for experimentation with photographs and other sign systems. South African photobooks are among the most prolific publications in Africa. They include a variety of works that range from colonial photographic books from the 1860s to recent and thought-provoking works such as those by Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Sophia Klaase. In the second half of the twentieth century, South African photobooks integrated a phenomenon in which photographic essays became to be used as a tool to document conflicts and denounce social problems. The article approaches this phase of South African photobooks by describing and analysing semiotic aspects of works by Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt. Their books indicate the existence of a variety of criteria - aesthetic, literary, political, and documentary - acting together to characterise the photobooks emerging around the 1960s in South Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Photographic book
• photography
• Peter Magubane
• David Goldblatt
• visual arts
• literature

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, South Africa whose funding made this publication possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Books in which the photograph occurs as an important or a predominant sign system are often described as photographic books (McCausland 1942; Sweetman 1986) or photobooks (Fernández 2011; Di Bello, Wilson, and Zamir 2012). As intermedial phenomena (Vitorio and Queiroz 2019), they are characterised mainly by the way they relate photographic images to each other and to different sign systems – such as verbal text, painting, drawing, typography, graphic design, etc. –, as well as by the way they explore the materiality of the book as a semiotic entity (Fernandes et al 2015; Vitorio and Queiroz 2016, 2019).

2 The number of anthologies published throughout the world in the early 21st century is an example of it (see Roth 2001, 2004; Parr and Badger 2004, 2009, 2014; Vartanian et al. 2009; Fernández 2011; Giersberg and Suermondt 2012; Karasik and Heiting 2015; and Yatskevich et al. 2017).

3 I take advantage of the occurrence of the term 'sign' to inform the reader that some definitions proposed by Peirce are used in this research. According to him (EP 2:411), semiosis, or semiotic process, can be described as the action of a sign. It concerns a relation constituted by three irreducibly connected terms (sign-object-interpretant, S-O-I) (CP 2.228). In its turn, "a sign is anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object" (CP 2.303). Peirce characterizes as iconic, indexical, and symbolic, the relations between S and O in the triad S-O-I. Icons are signs which stand for their objects through similarity or resemblance (CP 2.276). If S is a sign of O by reason of "a direct physical connection" between them (CP 1.372), then S is said to be an index of O. An indexical sign communicates a habit embodied in an object to the interpretant as a result of a direct physical connection between the sign and its object. Finally, in a symbolic relation, the interpretant stands for "the object through the sign" by a determinative relation of law, rule, or convention (CP 2.276).

4 Changing his name from Kole (with K) to Cole (with C) was the alternative that the photographer found to outwit the Race Classification Board, be "re-classified" as a Coloured (instead of Black), and be able to leave South Africa running from the apartheid (South Africa History Online, undated). Considering it, in this article I chose to honour Ernest Kole memory by graphing his name with "K".

5 Africa in the Photobook is a database created by Ben Krewinkel to catalogue photographic books made by African photographers or by non-Africans about Africa.

6 Following the Africa in the Photobook, in this article, I consider South African photographic books not only the book authored by South African photographers but also the ones made by non-Africans having the country as the subject.

7 Postcolonialism can be understood as a phenomenon substantiated by practices of resistance to colonialism that occur both during the institutional validity of colonialism and after its institutional end (Mbembe 2001). Akassi (2010, 336), describes a “postcolonial cultural subject” as who, even though diffracted and dominated, puts himself as resistance and subversion of colonial practices and the colonizing subject. In this article, I understand Magubane and Goldblatt as postcolonial cultural subjects and their works as postcolonial practices.

8 In this article, I understand “image” as the “concept” that is achieved by means of montage or any creative process (Eisenstein 1957, 31). More than what our visual apparatus is able to capture, the image is constructed as syntheses of dialectical processes.

9 The notion of “Otherness” concerns an understanding of the world as if it was “divided into mutually excluding opposites: if the Self is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the Other is chaotic, irrational, feminine, and evil” (Ashcroft, Griggiths, and Tiffin 2003, 3). Thus, the construction of the Other occurs as a process of demonization, which in itself expresses the ambivalence in which the authority is grounded.

10 Native Life on the Transvaal Border (Willoughby 1900), South African Natives – Their Home and Customs (Lazarus and Lazarus 1902), African Tribes employed on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines (Hallett and Helm 1944), and The Bantu Tribes of South Africa (Duggan-Cronin 1928-1954).

11 As it is pointed out by Enwezor and Zaya (1996), African self-image in the late 1930s and the 1940s was already being radically transformed, especially in countries such as Ethiopia. Despite that, in a general context, we can consider that this transformation became more meaningful after World War II.

12 According to Wolf (1999, 35–36), a medium “could be defined (…) also by the use of one or more semiotic systems serving for the transmission of cultural ‘messages’”.

13 Substantiated by Clark’s (2004) definition of cognitive artifacts, in this article, I understand photography and photobook as 'thinking-tools', as artifacts that organize perception and action.

14 I.e., a sign that points to what causes it as its object or referent, according to Peirce (EP 2:460-461).

15 The expressions “resistance” photography and or “struggle photography” (Krantz 2008, 290; Thomas 2021, 14) are used to describe a genre that is common among South African anti-apartheid photographers for being political in addition to being aesthetic. This notion is frequently used to refer to works such as those by Magubane, Ernest Kole, and the members of Afrapix, whose production is marked by the urgency and necessity to deal with the complexity of life under a separatist regime.

16 In Soweto: The Fruit of Fear (1986), Magubane explores aesthetic and narrative strategies such as the rhythmic structuring of pages and diptychs. He also organises its sequences into chapters marked by blank pages at their beginning and end.

17 According to Eisenstein (1957), juxtaposition is a basic procedure of montage. In sum, it concerns the act of relating two or more processes or entities to each other.

18 In this analysis, I focus on the indexical dimension of Goldblatt’s photographs working as signs that refer to the specificities of mining job relations in South Africa. But also note that, following Peirce's description of Sign-Object relations in semiotic processes (EP 2:460-461), in this article, I consider social phenomena such as apartheid and racial formulations as semiotic processes that are predominantly symbolic, since they are grounded in conventions and norms.

19 This is position was evinced by Goldblatt interviews such as the one with Martinez (2006, unpaginated), in which he explained his efforts to “withdraw” himself and not “be present in the pictures”.