Living Apart: South Africa Under Apartheid

ArtForum, Summer, 1996 by Carol Squiers

Anyone seriously interested in the postwar school of dystopian candid photography should have this book, which has fifty-some photos in it that the previous book didn't have, and which deletes a number of photos from the original as well. Some of Klein's notes, new to this book, are strange (New York will disintegrate until it's "reclaimed" by the Japanese, he says), but the pictures have extraordinary power.

Another volume that focuses mainly on New York is Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry, by photographer Sylvia Plachy and writer James Ridgeway, two Village Voice staffers. The "sex industry" encompasses strip joints, go-go clubs, the adult-film and -video trade, phone sex, cybersex, printed porn, massage parlors, specialty providers, and prostitution. In each part of the industry, Ridgeway interviewed workers who often make distinctions between their own practice and that of others, with prostitution being at the bottom of the "professional hierarchy." Each tells him what they do and why they do it, offering various explanations for their choices. But Ridgeway believes they all have one significant thing in common: "For most workers in the porn industry," he writes, "... the job boils down to creating images in other people's heads."

The images those people see are probably not the ones that Plachy has taken. Although there is always a certain predictable quality to photos of strippers and prostitutes, she manages to come up with pictures that are sometimes surprising in their visual description as well as in their weird combinations of absurdity and degradation. Others are uncommonly sympathetic, portraying the lonely vulnerability of people who have to risk much in order to receive very little. Neither Ridgeway nor Plachy seems to support the current rationale for sex work as empowering for women. In fact Ridgeway emphasizes how complicit the sex industry is toward patriarchy, and how attacks on pornography have aided in "a vast transformation of social policy," one of whose goals is the increasing control of women.

Control, and the fight to gain it, is at the heart of Ian Berry's Living Apart: South Africa under Apartheid. Berry, a longtime member of the Magnum photo agency, went to South Africa a naive English 18-year-old in 1952. Apprenticed in photography to a family friend, he knew nothing about "the race situation," but found out about it quickly enough, first by working at the Rand Daily Mail, a liberal white daily. There he began covering stories such as a headline-making treason trial in which a young Nelson Mandela was one of the defendants. His education continued at Drum, a picture magazine aimed at a black African audience, where he did small stories on "the light and dark sides of daily life in South Africa," showing the difficulties and lunacies of the country's racial policies, and the grace and spirit that existed in the black community there despite them. Berry's knowledge of the everyday life of the country is evident in all his pictures, which are much more subtle, varied, and ambiguous than the typically dramatic shots that journalists usually produce. Of course he took bloody photos too, making his reputation with images from the Sharpeville protests massacre in 1960.

After leaving the country in 1961, Berry periodically returned, until he was declared an enemy of South Africa and, from 1986 to the early '90s, was denied a visa. Then, in 1994, he journeyed back there to photograph the first nationwide voting to include all races. He writes that he went "expecting a disaster and experienced a miracle." The book ends on that note of astonished optimism, an unusual conclusion to a story of institutionalized bigotry and the inequities and violence it begets.

In The Wedding: New Pictures from the Continuing "Living Room" Series, a sequel to the 1991 book Living Room, Nick Waplington trains his camera on several working-class families living on a government-subsidized "housing estate" in Nottingham, England. Race is an element here, too, in that Janet, a zaftig redhead who is the nominal star of both this book and the earlier one, has shed one mate and is marrying another, Clive, a slim black man, who brings with him a new brood of children and other relatives. Waplington takes a close-up look at the preparations, celebrations, and general antics of these large, ebullient families and their friends.

As in the earlier book, children appear in the majority of pictures, crying, doing headstands, riding a bike indoors; one girl is having her foot sucked by a male adult. Their living circumstances are chaotic and messy but apparently full of laughs, and the possible complexities of race never ruffle the surface. If anything, this group seems tame compared to the earlier crew, which was even more wild and disheveled, with its expectorating baby, escaped parakeet, and a rogue male goosing the leading lady. Waplington's intimacy with the players - who consider him family - allows him an access and an ease that an outsider could never achieve.