1980s and 1990s, to considerable international
acclaim. Goldblatt was also instrumental in the
founding of the Market Photography Workshop
and as an individual mentor, where a number of
young artists of all races, most notably Santu Mo-
fokeng, could get hands-on training and also
engage in intellectual discussions about the politics
of representation.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of this work-
shop atmosphere between artists and of social rea-
list ‘‘struggle’’ photography. Still there was a
tension regarding the most appropriate subject
matter and formal approach among those who
hoped to document the struggle and aid the effort
to overthrow apartheid in South Africa. This ten-
sion can be seen by comparing two books from the
1980s:South Africa: The Cordoned Heart, prepared
by the Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Develop-
ment in Southern Africa; andBeyond the Barri-
cades: Popular Resistance in South Africa,a
project by the activist photographic collective Afra-
pix founded in 1982.The Cordoned Heartchroni-
cles the underdevelopment of black South Africa.
It contains mostly straightforward domestic scenes
and some images of political rallies (it includes a
portion of Goldblatt’s ‘‘Transported’’). The only
image of the State is at the end: in a photo by
Omar Badsha, police appear at the airport to escort
a recently released political prisoner. In contrast,
Beyond the Barricadesis by turns more lyrical and
more harshly realist, since it includes scenes of the
popular unrest and the police violence that perme-
ated South African life during the 1980s. Cops and
protesters and banners and blood are everywhere
in these images, but there are also sections without
images and a text that makes clear that photogra-
phy, even press photography, was also used by the
State as an instrument to surveil and silence. Afra-
pix members such as Steven Hilton-Barber, Santu
Mofokeng, Paul Weinberg, and Guy Tillim, who
initially worked together to supply the radical
press, workers’ organizations, and struggle culture
magazines such asStaffriderwith images at low
cost, by the later 1980s began moving away from
the starker definitions of struggle photography.
Weinberg began photographing the San of the
Kalahari, Mofokeng went to look for spiritual
sources in Lesotho, and Hilton-Barber showed
images of northern Transvaal male circumci-
sion—this last caused great controversy when
exhibited in 1990 at the Market Gallery in Johan-
nesburg. Photojournalists were also critical to the
exposure of atrocities committed by South African
occupying forces in Namibia. Likewise in Mozam-
bique, Ricardo Rangel set up a photography-train-
ing institute and archive for anti-colonial work, the
Centro de Formacao Fotografica in Maputo.
Just before the first democratic elections in South
Africa in 1994 high stakes commercial work was in
great demand by foreign press agencies and a num-
ber of intrepid photojournalists, including Ken
Oosterbroek, Mike Marinovich, Joao Silva, and
Ken Carter helped sensationalize the ultraviolence
of the transition period. After the elections and the
broader access to international exhibitions and
other art histories abroad, the 1990s and early
2000s also witnessed the production of more con-
ceptual and experimental approaches to photo-
graphic technique including the use of serially
arranged compositions (Mofokeng and Abrie
Fourie), the grid (Hentie van der Merwe), life-sized
color prints (Zwelethu Mthethwa), digital media
(Minette Vari), constructed still-life composition
(Lien Botha), and solopsistic meditations on the
history of the archive of South African photography
itself (Senzeni Marasela).
Because of the long history of struggle for repre-
sentation, there is still a strongly social activist
tendency in present photographic practice in
Southern Africa, even on the more artistic/concep-
tual end of the spectrum. Now there are other
struggles besides colonialism or apartheid: the pro-
blems of overcrowding and urban blight, AIDS,
the gay lifestyle, the continuing ‘‘stain’’ of race,
and the unifying yet divisive potency of the sacred
in everyday life. Artists working with photo-
graphic-related processes today are more aware of
the alternating perception of the photograph as
both artifact and artifice than were their peers
during the nineteenth century. Some, such as
Andrew Tshabangu, Tracey Rose, Jean Brundrit,
Berni Searle, and others, are endeavoring to use
this empowering knowledge to address the new
demands for representation felt by South Africans
in the post-apartheid era.
JOHNM. PefferSeealso:Ballen, Roger; Documentary Photography;
Drum; Photography in Africa: An Overview; Por-
traiture; Schadeburg, Ju ̈rgenFurther Reading
Van Wyk, Gary. ‘‘Drawing a Bead on Blacks: Eastern Cape
People Painted by Baines, Shot by Pocock.’’ In South
African National Gallery’sEzakwantu: Beadwork from
theEasternCape.CapeTown,SouthAfrica:SANG,1993.AFRICA: SOUTH AND SOUTHERN, PHOTOGRAPHY IN