Peter Magubane – Rhodes University Ceremony (2006)
Public Orator: Paul Walters Rhodes University Graduation ceremony, Grahamstown, 7 April 2006 Mr. Chancellor, I have the honour to present to you Dr Peter Magubane for the award of the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa. The distinguished novelist Joseph Conrad wrote in a famous preface: “My task which I am trying to achieve […]
Guy Tillim: ‘Departure’ (2003)
Essay excerpt from Departure: Enough seen. The vision was encountered under all skies. Enough had. Noises of cities, in the evening, and in the sun- shine, and always. Enough known. The pauses of life – O Sounds and Visions! Departure into new affection and new noise! Arthur Rimbaud – Les Illuminations. My journeys have […]
Robert Frank’s America (1982)
The feeling among them was unanimous: this was not how America was to be shown. But what was at issue was a larger matter than patriotism. The challenge of Frank’s work in the late ’50s lay in his treatment of his subject matter and in his use of a photographic style well out of the […]
Pieter Hugo and the Hyena Men – “The Dog’s Master” (2007)
“The first series of pictures had caused varying reactions from people – inquisitiveness, disbelief and repulsion. People were fascinated by them, just as I had been by that first cellphone photograph.” The Dog’s Master By Pieter Hugo These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a […]
WILLIAM EGGLESTON: “Before Color” (2010)
By Doug Rickard William Eggleston is a “Southern” artist. Without a deeper explanation, this statement itself could mean a few things. If you look at the body of his work on the whole, the majority of it (almost all) is set within the Southern environs of the US… places like Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and […]
David Goldblatt – Afrikaners Photographed and Revisited (1975-2006)
“The ideology and apparatus of apartheid and the overwhelming power of the state to crush opposition became ever more present in our lives.” Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975 – Some Afrikaners Revisited, 2006 By David Goldblatt, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2006 I was born and grew up in Randfontein, a gold-mining town 40 kilometres west of […]
ARTHUR ROTHSTEIN: “SELECT PICTURES FROM THE FSA PROJECT”
Alan Thomas on Roy DeCarava (1985)
Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, DC, 1963 By Alan Thomas (Originally published as “Literary Snapshots of the Sho-Nuff Blues,” In These Times, March 27-April 2, 1985) “Who can dance to this bopping music? In the old days we used to like blues. And I still do. But now the kids don’t lean on the piano no […]