It is one of his most famous photos. A white girl, she must be about eight years old, dressed in a chic dress and neatly finished cardigan, sits pontifically on a bench with the text ‘Europeans only’, so well known in South Africa, on it. Just behind her, but not on the couch, sits a black woman who lovingly places her fingers on the child’s neck. She wears the uniform of the anonymous domestic worker, the maid in the colonial context. South African photojournalist Peter Magubane, who died on Monday at the age of 91, captured the moment in 1956, in an affluent neighborhood in northern Johannesburg. It was eight years after the formal introduction of racial segregation.
The photo is also one of his more subtle. In the years that followed, Magubane became one of the most important chroniclers of the struggle against apartheid, with thinly veiled images of South African violence. He was on the front lines in 1960 when police carried out a massacre in the township of Sharpeville. He was there with his camera when Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the ANC liberation movement were tried in 1964. In 1976 he photographed the youth uprising in Soweto and from the late 1980s onwards he kept a close eye on the politically instigated violence between rival liberation movements.
Magubane realized early on the role images could have in changing public opinion. Many successful people of his generation chose to go into exile. That was not an option for him. “My camera is my weapon,” he often said in interviews. “I sent my images out into the world so that everyone could see what was going on in South Africa.” His photos mainly appeared in South Africa itself in the legendary magazine Drum and in the liberal newspaper Edge Daily Mail. All major newspapers worldwide adopted his work.
Peter Sexford Magubane (1932) grew up in Sophiatown. This vibrant multicultural neighborhood in Johannesburg, which has produced many more artists, was completely demolished in the 1950s to make way for a sterile ‘Europeans only’ neighborhood aptly named ‘Triomf’. His father, who sold vegetables on the street, gave him a Kodak Brownie box camera as a gift at a young age. With this he taught himself to photograph.
But when he joined in 1954 Drum ended up, it was not initially as a photographer. He was hired as a driver, even though he said he did not have a driver’s license at the time. He wanted to get his “foot in the door.” It worked. From a driver he became an assistant in the darkroom of staff photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. They soon sent him to meetings of the then not yet banned ANC.
No close-ups
Although he continued to make subdued photographs of daily life, mainly in black neighborhoods, throughout his career, ‘Sharpeville’ was a turning point for his style. The protest against the identity cards that non-white South Africans had to carry was brutally suppressed: 69 people were killed. Back at the editorial office, his boss unfortunately appeared not to be very satisfied with Magubane’s work: there were no close-ups. “I said I was shocked by what had happened,” he said a few years ago in a TV interview. “Then the editor-in-chief said to me: in this profession you can only be shocked afterwards.”
His working method became uncompromising. To get the best images, he stood, remembering the motto of war photographer Robert Capa, ‘close enough’. He was hit many times by rubber bullets from riot police. If, as a non-white photographer, it proved impossible for him to photograph ostentatiously, he would hide his Leica in a hollowed-out loaf of bread or in a milk carton in order to continue working. He became “an unfeeling animal,” he once said of that later period. “It is only after my job that I think about the dangers that were around me, about the tragedies that happened to my people.”
Increasingly anthropological
In 1969, Magubane was arrested while taking photographs outside the prison where Winnie Mandela, with whom he was close friends, was being held. He spent 586 days in solitary confinement and when he was released he was not allowed to practice his profession for five years. He did not succeed, after which he was arrested several times again. Everything changed when the regime released Nelson Mandela in 1990, including Magubane. The future president appointed him as his personal photographer.
He continued to take photographs well into his old age, but his work became increasingly anthropological. Until the Covid pandemic broke out, he was working on a major project to document the culture of white Afrikaners, the oppressor at the time. Many prizes and honorary doctorates followed, last year from the University of Pretoria. “How wonderful to receive a degree at 91,” he wrote in his acceptance speech. “My education is the university of life.” His daughter spoke the text because he was already too weak to go to university at the time.