by Peter Magubane, a black South African photographer whose images documenting the cruelties and violence of apartheid earned global praise but punishment at home, including beatings, imprisonment and 586 consecutive days of solitary confinement, died on Monday. He was 91 years old.
His death was confirmed by relatives who spoke to South African television. transmissions. No other details were provided.
Such were the challenges and dangers faced by black photographers in the segregated townships of apartheid-era South Africa, Magubane liked to say, that he began hiding his camera in hollowed-out loaves of bread, empty milk cartons, or even the Bible. , which allowed him to clandestinely take photographs.
“I didn’t want to leave the country to find another life,” he told The Guardian in 2015. “I was going to stay and fight with my camera as a weapon. I didn’t want to kill anyone though. “I wanted to end apartheid.”
He never staged photographs or asked permission to photograph people, he said. “I apologize later if anyone feels insulted,” she said, “but I want the photo.”
And he learned early in his career to put photography first. “It no longer surprises me,” she once said, “I am an unfeeling beast while taking photographs. Only after completing my mission do I think about the dangers that surrounded me, the tragedies that happened to my people.”
The country’s violence took its toll on him in 1992, when his son Charles, also a photographer and then in his early 30s, was murdered in the sprawling black township of Soweto. Magubane blamed the murder on Zulu immigrants living in shelters.
“I’ve been covering violence from the ’50s until now,” he said. “It has never impacted me like it impacts me now. Now he has knocked on my own door.”
It produced images of many of South Africa’s turning points, including the shooting deaths of 69 unarmed protesters in Sharpeville in 1960, the Rivonia trial of Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders in the early 1960s, and the uprising of high school students. in Soweto in 1976. But when The Guardian asked him in 2015 to select the best photograph of her, he chose a calmer image.
The photograph, from 1956, shows an anonymous black maid in a beret and apron serving a young white woman on a bench marked with the words “Europeans Only.”
It’s a poignant representation of a time and a symbol of the racial divide that the maid seems to be trying to overcome as her white charge stares inscrutably into the camera.
“When I saw ‘Europeans Only,’ I knew I would have to approach it with caution,” Magubane told The Guardian. “But I didn’t have a long goal, so I had to get closer. However, I did not interact with the woman or the child. I never ask permission when taking photographs. “I have worked in the midst of massacres, with hundreds of people murdered around me, and you cannot ask for permission.”
In that same period, he became friends with Nelson Mandela and Mr. Mandela’s then wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. After Mandela’s release from 27 years in prison in 1990, Magubane became his official photographer for four years, until Mandela’s election as South Africa’s first black president in 1994.
Magubane has often been praised among a generation of black photographers whose skin color gave them access to segregated townships but provoked visceral reactions among white police officers.
These photographers included Alf Khumalo and Sam Nzimawhose portrait of Hector Pieterson, a student who fell in the Soweto riots of 1976, became one of the most powerful images of the revolt and the racial conflict that fueled it.
Much of the impetus for the advancement of black photography came from a magazine called Drum, which chronicled the abuses of apartheid, and its German-born chief photographer, Jürgen Schadeberg. Magubane was so eager to join the magazine that he accepted a job as a driver and messenger in 1954 before working his way into the photography department.
It was increasingly presented as part of the campaign to end white minority rule.
After many run-ins with authorities, including five years under a so-called prohibition order, which denied him the right to work or even be photographed or summoned, Magubane participated in the Soweto riots “with my camera and a vendetta,” he said. . saying.
“Thanks to my photographs, the whole world saw what was happening,” he said.
When he arrived in Soweto that day, June 16, 1976, the young protesters “did not allow us to take photographs of them,” he told a university audience in South Africa in 2014.
And he added: “I told them: ‘Listen, this is a fight; A fight without documentation is not a fight. Let them capture this, let them take photographs of your struggle; then you have won.’”
He believed that whatever his role as a photographer was, it did not prevent him from intervening to save lives.
Testifying before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, he said that on June 16 in Soweto, a crowd was trying to pull a man from his car. “I quickly stopped taking pictures and went over there and said, ‘This isn’t going to help your cause at all,’” he said. “Fortunately this crowd listened; They listened to me and this man was able to drive to where he was going.”
He also recounted an incident involving a “famous” green car from which two white police officers opened fire.
“Wherever they were shooting, if there was someone who needed help, I would turn into an ambulance, pick up the body and take it to the hospital if the person was still alive,” Magubane told the commission.
“Sometimes my colleagues wanted to know from me if it was right for me to help because my job is to photograph,” he continued, “and I told them that if my editor ever told me that I shouldn’t help, I shouldn’t help when it’s necessary, then my editor can go to hell.”
Peter Magubane was born on January 18, 1932 in the mixed-race area of Johannesburg known as Vrededorp. He grew up in Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan suburb that was later zoned for white-only occupancy and renamed Triomf, the Afrikaans word for triumph.
His father, Isaac, who sold vegetables to white customers from a horse-drawn cart, was a “tall, thin man with ‘colored’ features who spoke the language of the oppressors, Afrikaans,” Magubane wrote in a 1978 essay. .one of the few times he spoke publicly about his family. In apartheid lexicon, “coloured” meant mixed race.
“My mother, Welhemina Mbatha,” he added, “was a dark-skinned woman who was proud of herself and was not willing to accept discomfort from anyone.”
From his teenage years onwards, Magubane lived under the increasingly strict control of apartheid, a ubiquitous network of racial legislation that underpinned the strictly enforced separation of South Africa’s white, black, “coloured” and Indian populations. Apartheid laws were so intrusive, she once said, that black photographers were not allowed to share darkrooms with white colleagues.
His interest in photography began when his father gave him a Kodak Box Brownie, although, by his own account, he completed his first professional assignment (photographing an African National Congress conference in 1955) with a Japanese-made Yashica camera, also paid for by his father.
His career cost him his first marriage, to Gladys Nala. Ms. Nala, she wrote, objected to her erratic work schedules and the nights in which she slept in the office because there was no way to return home. “So I had to choose between my career and my wife,” she wrote.
A second marriage, in 1962, ended in divorce three years later. He married Lenora Taitt, an American civil rights activist, in the early 1980s. His survivors include his wife; a daughter, Fikile Magubane; and grandchildren.
As the protests spread, Mr. Magubane’s work was marked by beatings and prison terms. At times, security police forced him to stand on three bricks for five days and nights in a row. He moved from Drum to The Rand Daily Mail, a liberal newspaper, and covered the growing number of forced deportations, when black communities were trucked to so-called “homelands” under apartheid’s vision of separation.
After being held in solitary confinement for 586 days, he was released in 1970 only to be declared a prohibited person. The terms of his restriction meant that for five years he was not allowed to socialize with more than one person at a time and was not allowed into any school or newspaper office.
In his 1978 essay, Magubane gave a harrowing account of the impact of living “five years as a ghost.”
“There was no one to talk to,” she said, “even my boyfriends ran away like rats.”
He added: “My job as a newspaper photographer was over. It meant the end of my profession.”
Even during prohibition he was sent to prison again, in 1971, and served 98 more days in solitary confinement, followed by six months in jail.
During all that time, he said, when he was detained under repressive laws ostensibly intended to counter communism and terrorism, “he had never been convicted of any crime.”
As the Soweto uprising unfolded, he and other black journalists were detained, this time for 123 days, and their house was burned down. But his images of the uprising earned him international recognition, including a job at Time magazine in South Africa in 1978. He then recorded the riots, protests and states of emergency of the mid-1980s that led to Mandela’s release.
Over time, he published 17 books, had numerous exhibitions, and received seven honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the prestigious Cornell Capa Infinity Award in 2010.
However, in his later years, as he battled prostate cancer, he focused more on sunsets than protests, telling the New York Times in 2012: “I’m tired of dealing with dead people. Now I deal with sunsets. They’re so beautiful. You see so many; It’s like meeting beautiful women.”
