Reframing Johannesburg’s urban politics through the lens of the Chinese Camera Club of South Africa

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa was formed in 1952 in Johannesburg and was active throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Chinese South Africans were adversely affected by the consolidation of urban racial segregation during apartheid. The Club and its members used the spatial tactic of the photographic outing to disrupt the racialisation of space within Johannesburg, as well as to produce photographs that expressed aspirations that were curtailed by the apartheid system. Photographic outings created temporary zones of autonomy in which photographers could capture subversive and otherwise ephemeral experiences of space. I also examine a photographic exhibition organised by the Chinese Camera Club that formed part of the Johannesburg Festival of 1956. By participating in this celebration of civic pride, the Chinese Camera Club exploited a conspicuous public platform to enhance the visibility and prestige of both themselves and the wider Chinese community within Johannesburg. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, the exhibition contested the relations of difference that were imposed upon club members by racial classification, and replaced exclusionary notions of their difference with relentlessly positive ones. Simultaneously, the exhibition asserted a sense of their belonging to Johannesburg, in spite of their precarious right to reside within it

Minna Keene : a neglected pioneer

Born in Germany in 1861, Minna Keene lived in Cape Town during a prolific phase of her photographic career. Whilst at the Cape (1903-1913), she achieved international acclaim as a pictorialist photographer. Her photographs of South African subject matter were shown at exhibitions across the world. She was quick to recognise opportunities to translate her photographic success into financial profit and was one of very few women to operate a photographic studio in early-twentieth century South Africa. Keene actively circulated reproductions of her photographs as self-published postcards and in popular publications. Through these interventions, she made a substantial contribution to popular visual culture at the Cape and was celebrated by local and international audiences. Despite her pioneering status, she has been overlooked in the existing literature on South African photography, and, although she has received limited attention in Euro-American histories of photography, much remains unknown about her life and work, especially in relation to her time in Cape Town. Drawing on multisited research, I present a biographical account of Keene which analyses the ambivalent gender politics in her photographs as well as her uncritical adoption of colonial categories of race

A Spirit of Cosmopolitanism Happily Prevailing in Art: The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa and Transnational Networks of Photography

The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa was formed in 1952 by members of Johannesburg’s small Chinese community who found themselves excluded from local circuits of photography on the grounds of race. The membership of the Chinese Camera Club sought international recognition as well as local visibility by engaging with transnational networks of photography. In so doing, they became agents in the global dissemination of photographic practices and technologies and asserted a cultural cosmopolitanism that subverted the parochialism of apartheid’s racial hierarchy. Alongside their cosmopolitan patterns of association, they also convened and sustained racially exclusive communities of photographic practice. They staged two international photographic salons in Johannesburg in 1956 and 1964 that were open to photographers from across the worldwide Chinese diaspora and thereby helped forge an imagined community of overseas Chinese photographers. In so doing, the Club and its members established a proprietorial connection with so-called “Chinese” approaches to photography and stressed their enduring connection to idealised and ahistorical notions of Chinese culture and civilisation. This paper explores both of these globally articulated identities—the cosmopolitan and the diasporic—as the result of transnational strategies that fostered autonomy and pride in the face of local racial discrimination