Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950

Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950. By Tosha Grantham. Charlottesville and London: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009. Distributed by the University of Virginia Press. Pp. 160. $35.00 paper. When Tosha Grantham decided to curate "a brief survey" of South Africa's postwar photographic culture, she took on a daunting task. South Africa may be a relatively small country, but it has produced several distinct generations of photographers and visual artists, working in a variety of traditions. Deciding who to include in Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950, the catalog and touring exhibition, and how to interpret their work presented challenges that Grantham only partly overcomes. The eighteen artists and photographers included in Darkroom represent a cross-section of practitioners- young and old, black and white, male and female. Some have long since established global reputations; others deserve wider recognition outside of South Africa. The book's weaknesses have to do with exclusion, rather than inclusion. Too many important photographers and photographic movements have been left out, and that prevents Darkroom from being the overview it aspires to be. The roots of the problem are both practical and theoretical. First, over a third of the plates in the book (35 out of 110) are devoted to the work of just two men- David Goldblatt and Jurgen Schadeberg. This gives their output undue weight and occupies space that would have been better used by opening the door to more photographers. Second, the book misreads South African photography's history, constructing an implicit narrative of movement from documentary photography to fine art photography. This storyline rests on a sharp but unsustainable dichotomy between documentary practice and art, a point to which I shall return. Whatever its weaknesses, Darkroom is full of superb photographs. The deeply saturated color portraits of urban and urbanizing Africans that Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall made in the 1960s and 1970s will be a fascinating discovery, even for people who know something about South African photography. Nontsikelelo Veleko's contemporary portraits of young Johannesburg hipsters show how both South Africans' identities and photographic styles have become less local and more globalized. Readers get a tantalizing, but far too brief glimpse of Santu Mofokeng's "Black Photo Album" series, in which he has rephotographed and reimagined nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studio portraits of the black middle class. They will also want to see more of Sue Williamson's "Better Lives" project, a sensitive and angry response to recent outbreaks of xenophobia in South Africa. …