South African photographer - The African Mirror

Jan

2024

Peter Magubane: courageous photographer who chronicled South Africa’s struggle for freedom

PETER Sexford Magubane, a courageous South African photographer whose images testify to both the iniquity of apartheid and the determination and devotion of those who brought about its demise, passed away at 91 years of age in early January 2024. KYLIE THOMAS, Senior Researcher and Senior Lecturer (Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork), NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Magubane leaves behind a vast archive of extraordinary images, many of which continue to be the signature images of some of the worst atrocities committed by the apartheid regime. The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid. In 1969 Magubane…

Jan

2024

By BHARGAV ACHARYA

Peter Magubane, South African photographer who documented apartheid, dies aged 91

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

PETER Magubane, the renowned artist-photographer who shed light on the everyday struggles of Black South Africans for decades under apartheid, died on Monday. He was 91. After joining Drum magazine in 1955, Magubane gained prominence as one of the few Black photographers covering the repressive era. One of his landmark images, taken a year later in a wealthy Johannesburg suburb, showed a white girl sitting on a bench with a sign reading "Europeans Only" while a Black worker sat behind her combing her hair. In the 1960s, amid a surge in anti-apartheid activism, he covered Nelson Mandela's arrest and the…

Jan

2023

By The African Mirror

Ernest Cole: South Africa’s most famous photobook has been republished after 55 years

LITERATURE

PHOTOGRAPHER Ernest Cole was born in 1940 in the Pretoria township of Eersterust, just before apartheid was formally introduced in South Africa in 1948. Author KYLIE THOMAS, Senior Researcher, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies He was 20 when thousands of people gathered outside a police station in Sharpeville township to protest against being forced to carry passbooks by the white minority government. On that day at least 69 people were shot dead, hundreds were injured, and a state of emergency was declared. The Sharpeville Massacre is regarded as a turning point in the struggle for liberation in…