A short methodological paper on interviewing photographers

Newbury, Darren

English

University of Brighton Repository

A photographer’s story: methodological reflections

University of Brighton Research Portal

en fr (http://dakar-bamako-photo.eu/fr/) ☰Photography and OralityDialogues in Bamako, Dakar andElsewhereA Photographer’s Story:Methodological ReflectionsDarren Newbury I had just finished a lengthy interview with the South Africanphotographer Peter Magubane, in which we had talked about hislong career, including the early days on Drum magazine, hisphotographs made in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre,the difficulties of working faced with the oppression of theapartheid security apparatus, and the direction his photographyhad taken in the post-apartheid period. As I was preparing to leavehe suddenly stopped me. He had remembered something andinsisted that I must sit back down, turn on my recording deviceagain and listen to the story he had recalled. Peter Magubane isnot someone to be refused, and besides I was intrigued, not leastby importance he appeared to place on recording this one for theofficial record.As promised, he proceeded to narrate a story that was bothfascinating and hilarious, exemplifying the photographer’s abilityto outwit the apartheid authorities. It was set in the early 1950s.Magubane was out on an assignment with fellow Drum journalistand writer Nat Nakasa covering the issue of child labour in Bethal,a farming area to the east of Johannesburg notorious for thebrutal treatment of its workers. Bethal was the focus of acelebrated Drum photo-story in 1952, and had earlier drawn theattention of campaigners and journalists, including Michael Scottand Ruth First. Magubane related how the police had arrestedthem while he was busy making photographs, and taken them tothe local police station for questioning. We then come to the pointof the story. Annoyed by this interruption to his day and fearingthe consequences, the quick-witted Magubane came up with aplan. I’ll let him tell this part of the tale in his own words – readersnot familiar with the old style Weston light meter and itsaccompanying leather case may need to acquaint themselves withthis old technology to get the point: We got to the police station and he starts swearing at us, so I take outmy light meter, I did this [gestures moving the meter about in hishand] and as the needle goes that way I closed it, when it goes I openthe back and the needle goes past. I closed the back and then theneedle goes back slowly. He says ‘what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I am inconsultation with my office in Johannesburg, all the insults that youhave been saying here, my office knows what exactly you are doingand where we are.’ You know this man believes me and he calls hissuperior. His superior comes, I close the back and I open the back, butwhen you open the back the light comes in you see, and then theneedle goes, so the needle goes, as we are talking the needle goes andthen I close the back and the needle goes back. And he says ‘what thehell is going on there?’ I said, ‘I am in contact with my office, you cando what you like, my office already knows we are in your hands andyou have been so abusive.’ The man said, ‘Look, take your damn carand move away from here, never come back here again.’ We got intothe car and we drove off and we were safe.Now there are some interesting things to say about this story, butthe first point I want to make relates to this specific occasion of itstelling, in the context of an interview by a visiting researcher.Despite the urgency with which I was requested to record thisnarrative, it was certainly not the first occasion on which it hadbeen relayed by the photographer. This was not the revelation ofsome new information for the historical account. Quite thecontrary, a version of the story can be found published muchearlier in one of Magubane’s photographic books. And no doubt ithad been recalled for the entertainment of friends and colleagueslong before it was reproduced in a more permanent form. Thepurpose of the telling then was not to impart new information assuch, but rather more pedagogical. I was being offered a lesson inwhat it meant to be a photographer during that period of SouthAfrica’s history; as Magubane put it, ‘you needed to be sharp, youneeded just to be sharp to be ahead of them’. And as an academicI was also seen as a means by which this lesson might be passedon to future generations. On more than one occasion whilstinterviewing South African photographers during my research Ihave been conscious that my interviewee has viewed me as avehicle through which stories of photography and apartheid canreach a wider audience.But that is not the only point I want to make. Not only had thisstory been told before, but also there are remarkable structuralsimilarities with many other stories told by South Africanphotographers that I have heard and read over the years. The useof the light meter provides a pleasing role for photographictechnology in the narrative, but one could substitute many otherstories for this one. There are numerous and oft-cited accounts,including from Magubane, of photographers concealing camerasin loaves of bread, milk cartons or under coats in order to obtainpictures they could not have captured openly. A fellowphotographer at Drum, Bob Gosani, was the subject of a story inwhich the magazine editor’s white secretary pretended to be anamateur photographer wanting to make panoramic views of thecity, accompanied by Gosani and journalist Arthur Maimane as herblack assistants. The ruse enabled them to get onto the roof of thenurses’ home that overlooked Johannesburg’s central prison,where they were able to photograph the courtyard and theinfamous ‘tausa’ dance – prisoners stripped naked were made toperform a humiliating routine to demonstrate that they hadnothing concealed on their person. The images were thecentrepiece of a 1954 Drum story on prison conditions, and nowform a small display at Constitutional Hill, a post-apartheidheritage site at the location of the former prison. Anotherphotographer of the same generation, Alf Kumalo, relayed how hetravelled in and out of Soweto in the boot of a car in order to makephotographs. And of course, Ernest Cole, one of the mostsignificant chroniclers of apartheid, is the subject of a storywherein he fooled the authorities into classifying him as ‘coloured’,which greatly facilitated his ability to move about the city andrecord the oppressive conditions for South African blacks.Viewed in isolation, one might ask whether any individual story istrue or not, whether or to what extent it has been polished in thetelling to exploit its narrative potential or enhance its impact,comic or otherwise. Seen collectively, however, these questionsbecome somewhat less important, with the core narrative –contrasting the stupidity of the apartheid authorities to thecanniness of the photographer – around which, to a greater orlesser extent, all these individual stories revolve taking on thequalities of myth, in the sense of a particular way of explaining theworld to oneself and others. Stories such as these, I suggest, werean important indicator of the photographic culture of the time, asignificant dimension of how photographers thought aboutthemselves and the task that they were engaged in, with wider asymbolic significance with respect to South African society.Unsurprisingly for photographers’ stories, at their centre arequestions of knowing and seeing, or more precisely the ability ofthe photographer to reveal ‘how things really are’ in an oppressivesociety, despite the restrictions placed on the movement of blackphotographers; their ability to see and record the world.In Magubane’s story, the light meter is presented as a magicalobject, which enables his office to know what is going on at thepolice station; by extension Magubane’s camera shares thisquality, enabling the world to know what is going on in Bethal, andapartheid South Africa. This narrative also effects a nice reversalwherein it is the black African actor who is master of thetechnology of photography, and the white police officer who isbewildered, and indeed frightened, by its operation.Following this line of thought, photographers’ stories, rather thanbeing treated as a means of simply gathering information on thelife and work of the photographer, might become an object ofstudy in their own right. This prompts further questions. Forexample, what is the relationship between these photographers’stories and other narratives circulating in the culture? I wouldhazard a guess that this kind of story could be placed within awider set of cultural narratives related to means of negotiating andsubverting the racist and bureaucratic apartheid state. Butperhaps the photographers’ stories are paradigmatic or archetypalin this regard; the photographer is a key figure in the telling andshowing of the injustice of apartheid. How do such narrativesevolve over time? The comic portrayal of an incompetent andamateurish apartheid security state that comes through many ofthese stories is, I suspect, a feature of stories shaped in the earlyyears of apartheid. Tracking the evolution of the genre throughlater decades may well reveal stories of encounters with theapartheid state that are less comical and more brutal or traumatic.contact (fr/contact.html)legal notes (fr/legal-notes.html)Magubane, for example, was subject to police violence andextended periods of imprisonment. One might also ask how thestories told by white photographers compare with their blackcounterparts.And thinking beyond the specific context of apartheid South Africa,what other stories are being told by photographers elsewhereacross Africa, and what do these have to tell us about the place ofphotography in very different cultural settings? I hope that thisshort essay can serve as a prompt for other researchers who usephotographer interviews as part of their methodology to reflectnot just on the content of the narratives they hear, but to listenagain to the ways in which they are told, and the insights theyprovide into the rich and diverse practices of photography acrossthe continent.Darren Newbury, Director of Postgraduate Research Studies (Artsand Humanities) and Professor of Photographic History at theuniversity of Brighton

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A photographer’s story: methodological reflections

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