cans often blurred the edges between factual docu-
ment and paternalistic fantasy. Interestingly, ima-
ges of the amaZulu were in especially great demand
abroad, because of their nation’s famous resistance
against European territorial ambitions under lea-
ders like Shaka, Dingane, and Cetshwayo. Virginia
Lee-Webb has noted that many nineteenth century
images of the amaZulu often were made in-camera
using fantasy backdrops, jungle scenes, and staged
sittings. South African studio photographers even
had boxes of ‘‘tribal’’ props for their sitters to wear
and hold.
While in both ethnographic and commercial
photography, African people were mostly imagined
to be part of the flora of the country, a small number
of studios such as H. F. Fine in Johannesburg, Deale
in Bloemfontein, and traveling portrait photogra-
phers took pictures of petit bourgeois, middle class,
and mission-educated black sitters. These images
were mostly forgotten in storage rooms and the
bottoms of drawers during the apartheid years
from 1948–1994, but have recently been unearthed
as part of Santu Mofokeng’s (1991–2000) concep-
tual archival project,The Black Photo Album/Look
At Me 1890–1950.In these portraits, turn of the
century black families imagine themselves differ-
ently than the authors of the anthropological or
studio fantasies of the ‘‘natives.’’ They face the cam-
era with dignity and wear Victorian attire.
At the other end of the spectrum was the multi-
year, 6000 image documentary project on native
‘‘types’’ by Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, a for-
mer employee of De Beers Consolidated Mines in
Kimberley. His tribal categorizations are random
and arbitrary, but his images have the benefit of
giving dignity to their subjects and not removing
whatever signs of contemporaneousness they wore
as everyday garb. His pseudo-ethnological four-
volume The Bantu Tribes of Southern Africa
(1928–1954), however, would later be used, espe-
cially after 1948 by the architects of apartheid like
Daniel Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd, as evidence
of the ‘‘natural’’ separation of the races and ethni-
cities. This, they believed, needed to be enforced
through strict policing of borders and national leg-
islation to keep African groups distinct from each
other and apart from Europeans.
Closer in line with art photography, but equally
romanticizing of her subject, were the many por-
traits of amaNdebele taken by Constance Stuart
Larrabee during the 1930s and 1940s. The amaN-
debele were a people whose lands had been taken
during the nineteenth century and were living scat-
tered on white farms just a short drive north of
Stuart’s studio in Pretoria. Because of easy access
to their homesteads by white weekenders, the
amaNdebele have become something of an arche-
type of pristine native life in South Africa as seen as
a whole. For this reason they would later be orga-
nized into a ‘‘homeland’’ and a tourist colony by
the South African government.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the entrenchment of
apartheid was reacted against by the efflorescence
of documentary type, series-oriented, photojourna-
listic photography. Popular white owned, but
black oriented and black staffed photo magazines
likeDrum andZonk!devoted themselves to the
politics and social life of the day.Drum would
later be printed in West African and Caribbean
editions, thus bringing images of South African
life to other parts of Africa during the period of
independence. At a time of growing racial animos-
ity, activism by Nelson Mandela and the African
National Congress, and government repression,
Drumfeatured photographers like Alf Khumalo,
Ju ̈rgen Schadeburg, Peter Magubane, Ranjith
Kally, G.R. Naidoo, and Bob Gosani, giving the
first mass exposure to a mixed-race group of out-
standing photojournalists.
Black photographers were treated with particu-
lar roughness by the authorities. In 1969 Peter
Magubane was placed in solitary confinement for
two years, and then banned from taking photo-
graphs for another five. He later worked forTime
and has published several major books on the
1976 Soweto student uprising and the revolution-
ary struggle of the 1980s. His colleague Ernest
Cole was less fortunate. Cole’s bookHouse of
Bondage, published in 1967, was a book-length
version of the kind of photo essay work seen in
Drum—the absurdity of pass laws, conditions of
black poverty, illegal drinking establishments in
the black townships, syncretic religion, the African
middle class, and the romance/exile of the ‘‘bantu
homelands’’—but for an international audience.
House of Bondage was banned in South Africa
but copies were circulated underground and
Cole’s work influenced several subsequent genera-
tions of black and white photographers in South
Africa. Unable to live in South Africa after the
publication of his book, Cole went into exile and
eventually died penniless on the streets of Manhat-
tan. The other great master of the serial documen-
tary approach was David Goldblatt who from the
1960s published a number of disturbingly frank
portraits in a number of works including Some
Afrikaners Photographed(1975), andThe Trans-
ported of KwaNdebele(1989). Roger Ballen contin-
ued this documentation of Afrikaners in their
homes and enacting inexplicable rituals in theAFRICA: SOUTH AND SOUTHERN, PHOTOGRAPHY IN