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The Black & White Fifties:
Photographs by Jurgen Schadeberg
When Jurgen Schadeberg arrived in South Africa in 1950 from Germany he found two societies running parallel, but entirely separate. There was an invisible wall between two worlds—The Black World and The White World.
In the fifties the black world was becoming culturally and politically dynamic, whereas the white world seemed to be isolated, cocooned, colonial and ignorant of the black world. As a newcomer and outsider, Schadeberg managed to move easily from one world to the other, photographing scenes as varied as a white masked ball in the City Hall, an African National Congress defiance campaign meeting, a Shebeen (illicit bar or club) in Sophiatown, and the Durban July Horse Race.
The political campaigns against Apartheid Laws in the early fifties were surprisingly peaceful, from a contemporary perspective. There was an almost gentlemanly attitude between the government officials or Special Branch police and the political demonstrators. On one occasion a speaker standing at a political meeting even stopped his speech so that the Special Branch officer could reload his tape recorder, recalls Schadeberg. “We all believed that the Apartheid regime would not last, which, in a way, explains the naive enthusiasm which I think is portrayed in many of my pictures.” It was only in the late fifties and early sixties that clashes became more violent and more brutal.
Schadeberg freelanced for a number of magazines and photo agencies during the fifties, including Drum, Time Life, and SABC Radio, as well as selling many of his photographs to German, French and American publications.
Image:
KES students during sorts festival in Johannesburg, 1959
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