Invisible Communities and Their Visible Cameras: The Landscape Photography of the Chinese Camera Club of South Africa

Abstract

The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa (CCCSA), sometimes known as the Chinese Camera Club of Johannesburg, was a group of Chinese South African photographers who were at their most active during the 1950s and 1960s. Despite their small numbers and the discrimination and exclusion they suffered as Chinese South Africans, this group of tenacious and dedicated photographers achieved success and recognition in photographic networks at home and abroad. I will concentrate on one aspect of their output—namely, landscape photography—to argue that individual members of the CCCSA used photography to visualize a sense of belonging to both China and South Africa.1 By giving visual expression to multiple configurations of identity, which were simultaneously local and international, club members actively contested their treatment by the apartheid state. In particular, I consider how members of the club photographed the South African landscape in ways which drew on conventions associated with Chinese landscape painting. I will argue that this expressed notions of pride and belonging that counteracted the humiliation and discrimination suffered by Chinese South Africans during apartheid. I also consider how club members mastered local South African approaches to landscape photography to communicate their attachment to Johannesburg and South Africa, as well as to prove their equality with white-dominated camera clubs and photographic societies. Darren Newbury (2013:231) has astutely observed the “need to consider a wider range of photographic practices than have typically been given attention in histories of South African photography.” Newbury (2013:227) suggested that such research can reveal how “ordinary South Africans” used photography to express “dreams and aspirations” that were curtailed by the apartheid system.2 As its achievements show, the CCCSA functioned in exactly this way: it allowed photographers, individually and collectively, to represent themselves and their communities in ways which transcended the restrictive identities imposed upon them by the hierarchies of racial classification embedded within the apartheid nation state.