A Space of One’s Own: Studio Photography and the Making of Black Urban Femininities in the 1950s East Rand

Abstract

This article considers the significance of studio photography in the lives of young women growing up in the townships of the East Rand (present-day Ekurhuleni, South Africa). Studio photographs and personal photographic albums are an interesting source to analyze the making of 1950s youth culture from the perspective of young women. This perspective is difficult if not impossible to obtain if historians focus solely on the emerging gang subculture known as “tsotsism,” I argue that photographic activities such as going to the studio, exchanging photographs during courtship and compiling photo albums enabled young women, despite over-crowded living conditions and parental surveillance, to carve out fragile bubbles of interiority for themselves. As objects of intimacy, photography thus participated in the privatization of lives in the townships. Through their engagement with photography, and by challenging the conventional representations of femininity, young women quietly laid claim to the sphere of leisure and took part in defining certain aspects of the new urban culture emerging in the black townships of the Rand. The article is based in part on interviewees’ own private photographic collections but mainly on the Ronald Ngilima Photographic Archive, a collection of over 5600 images made by photographer Ronald Ngilima and his son Torrance in the Benoni area, between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s.