1970-1979
THE SOWETO UPRISING, JUNE 16, 1976 Like Cornell Capa’s idea of “concerned photography,” post1948 photographic production in South Africa was often referred to as “struggle photography.” The notion of struggle photography was especially pronounced in the wake of the Soweto Uprising, given the powerful pictures of that event made by such key photographers as Peter Magubane, Sam Nzima, and Alf Kumalo. In Soweto, on June 16, 1976, police attacked high school students protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of instruction. This event fundamentally changed the direction of opposition to apartheid. Nzima’s photographs of Hector Pieterson, the first publicly identified student killed during the uprising, contributed to a new pictorial and documentary impulse in depictions of the resistance. The photograph of Pieterson’s lifeless body in the arms of another student was as horrifying as it was iconic, and soon became one of the most famous images to emerge from the history of apartheid. So compelling was the propaganda value of the picture that Nadine Gordimer christened it the “pietà” of the struggle. Along with Nzima’s photographs, Magubane’s more diverse pictures captured the dramatic, chaotic confrontations between students and police. By 1976, Magubane had worked for two decades on the frontlines of the struggle. From his early days with Drum, he suffered relentless government harassment. His Soweto images appeared a year after the apartheid regime had lifted a five-year ban on his work as a photographer. Before the ban, he had been imprisoned and placed in solitary confinement for some 500 days. For his Soweto work, he was beaten and jailed again. The riveting and powerful images that Magubane produced during and in the aftermath of the Soweto Uprising ushered in a new era of struggle photography.
Peter Magubane, Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976
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