South African photography and the lives of workers

ABSTRACT

When Matlala and Matom first began photographing their respective worlds in the 1980s, demand for political images of apartheid overshadowed quotidian concerns. Since then, a shift away from the political to the personal in South African photography has offered a space of reflection for the kinds of images that they sought to make. This paper focuses on the historical, social and political aspects of these two photographers’ photo-archives. It attempts to place their work and photographic concerns within the broader archive of South African photography and to demonstrate continuities and ruptures between the past and the present.Photographs are first and foremost, records, and markers of time. Although photographs might be seen to be of their time, of everyday occurrences, they also transcend time. Thus, their relationship to time is necessarily complex, and requires interpretation and analysis within a disciplinary and discursive frame, which in this paper is work and the everyday.

KEYWORDS:

• William Matlala
• Victor Matom
• work
• apartheid
• the everyday
• South African photography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Nnamdi Elleh for his valuable guidance and suggestions in the initial draft of this paper, and two anonymous reviewers for useful recommendations and additions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. All photographs by William Matlala are reproduced with his kind permission.

2. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

3. I am grateful to Dr Kally Forrest for clarifying this.

4. I am grateful to Dr Kally Forrest for clarifying this.

5. These concerned both South Africans migrants (chiefly from the Eastern Cape and Northern Transvaal) and external migrants from other African countries (especially Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi).

6. Baaskap meaning control by white people of non-white people.

7. Michael Goldblatt is a professional photographer. His photographs of Alexandra adorn the walls of the Alexandra Clinic. Goldblatt has a legal degree, and Adele Gordon a doctorate in Education. They established Phototeach in 1984 to provide short amateur and professional courses for photographers. The courses were developed following discussions with a range of practising professional photographers and teachers of photography at tertiary institutions. In addition, they researched short term courses offered in the UK, US and France, as well as a distance course in photography offered by the New York Institute of Photography.

8. On September 1, 1988, Khotso House, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), the UDF and the photographic collective Afrapix was damaged extensively by explosives set by members of the Security Branch. The order for the destruction of the building came from P.W. Botha, then State President of South Africa.

9. I am grateful to Michael Goldblatt and Dr Adele Gordon for their generosity in providing this detail about Phototeach.

10. All photographs by Victor Matom are reproduced with his kind permission.

11. “The Complete Worker” was the title given to Matlala’s exhibition at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, September–October 2018, curated by the author.

12. See, for example, Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Tagg 1988), The Disciplinary Frame (Tagg 2009) and “The Archiving Machine” (Tagg 2012), and Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs” (Sekula 1981) and Photography Against the Grain (Sekula 1984).