Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa by Darren Newbury
Published by University of South Africa (UNISA) Press, December 2009

“This book is much more than just a discourse on photography in the land of apartheid. And it goes well beyond sophisticated debate on the artistic merits of images. While keeping the lens trained on the evolution of photography it plunges the reader into a sharp and evocative socio-cultural history of a country in deep conflict.” - From the Foreword by Albie Sachs

Chapters:
1. An African Pageant: Between Native Studies and Social Documentary
2. ‘A Fine Thing’: The African Drum
3. ‘Johannesburg Lunch-hour’: Photographic Humanism and the Social Vision of Drum
4. An ‘Unalterable Blackness’: Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage
5. An Aesthetic of Fists and Flags: Struggle Photography
6. ‘Lest We Forget’: Photography and the Presentation of History in the Post-apartheid Museum

ISBN 978-1-86888-523-7

About the book

Defiant Images is the first book-length historical study of photography in apartheid South Africa and a significant contribution to research on documentary photography in the twentieth century.  The chapter on Ernest Cole is the first major account of the life and work of one of Africa’s most important photographers.  Other chapters contribute to an understanding of the photographers Constance Stuart Larrabee and Leon Levson, the Drum magazine school of photography and the struggle photography of the 1980s.

Defiant Images develops a critical historical method for engaging with photographs of South Africa during the apartheid period, considering the photographs in their original contexts and their relationship to the politics of the time, listening to the voices of the photographers to try and understand how they viewed the work they were doing, and examining the place of photography in a post-apartheid era.

Defiant Images is based on substantial primary research, including interviews with photographers, editors and curators, and analysis of photographs held in collections and displayed in museums. The book is extensively illustrated, with close discussion of many photographs.

Available worldwide from:

Eurospan Bookstore
http://www.eurospanbookstore.com/display.asp?K=9781868885237
http://www.eurospanbookstore.com/offer (20% discount until 31.03.10 code: NEW0210)

Foto8 Bookshop
http://www.foto8.com/item—Defiant-Images—bk_defiant_images.html

Amazon UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Defiant-Images-Photography-Apartheid-Africa/dp/1868885232

About the author

Darren Newbury is Professor of Photography at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University. He is also current editor of the international journal Visual Studies.