Artist Peter Magubane will be visiting UCLA during the remainder
of January as a Regent’s Lecturer. He is sharing his
photographic work, which documents the rise and fall of apartheid
in South Africa.
Magubane has had no formal art training. In fact, he started out
driving photographers to sites for the magazine “African
Drum.” Only later did he actually begin to take pictures.
Through what Magubane simply describes as “hard work,”
he has gained prestige and notoriety.
At the start of his career, Magubane set out to depict the
situation in South Africa under apartheid.
“A struggle with no documentation is no struggle,”
he said, explaining that photographs were necessary to catapult the
situation into national and international consciousness.
Magubane, who said he was “just doing [his] job,”
frequently put his life on the line to get shots of things such as
protest marches and charred bodies. He followed assassins’
cars, snuck into coal miners’ quarters, and attended
riots.
“The authorities did not like interference” he
recalled.
Magubane was arrested six times. He described the torture that
he endured during one particular interrogation.
“They made me stand on three bricks, the middle one
uneven. They gave me black coffee only, no sugar. On the fifth day
I fell. I urinated blood. They gave me tablets to ease the
pain,” he said.
Still, Magubane continued his work. “I didn’t
believe in being dictated to,” he said.
Early on, Magubane learned the force of the photographer, what
he described as the power “to document how people are living
and what they are living through.”
Many of his pictures depict violence on individuals, symbolic of
the violence that afflicts South Africa. This representation
ensures that “the child’s blood did not flow in vain.
Its blood brought liberation,” Magubane said.
“Not just blacks, all people were involved in the struggle
of South Africa,” Magubane said. There has been much
progress. “The last time there was censorship was in
1987,” he said, adding, “now most people have come to
terms with democracy.”
Magubane’s goal is “for children and grandchildren
to know how some of us were brought up, with blacks as the
underdogs. I don’t want this to occur again” he
said.
Next year, the California African-American Museum and Exposition
Park in downtown Los Angeles will feature an exposition of
Magubane’s photographs.
Right now, Magubane said, he is ready for a change in medium.
“My next work may involve documentary film.”