Photojournalism, media freedom and democracy

Abstract

In the teeming Negro and colored shantytowns of Johannesburg, where newspapers and magazines are a rarity, a truck piled high with magazines rumbled through the unpaved streets last week. Wherever it stopped, hundreds of people swarmed about it, buying the magazine: The African Drum. (extract from 'South African Drumbeats', TIME Magazine, 1952) This short article is based on an address I offered at the opening of the 'G.R. Naidoo: a generous eye' photographic exhibition held at the Albert Luthuli Museum in Groutville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, on 18 June 2010. (1) The travelling exhibition celebrates the work and life of G.R. Naidoo, a photojournalist who was committed to reporting on South Africa's freedom struggle in the 1950s. The Drum Decade (1950s), as the moment is known, has a special place in South African popular memory. This was the time and the place that a whole generation of black journalists and photographers cut their teeth, and went on to become the subject of university classrooms and academic books on literature and films for well over the next seven decades. So powerful was the writing and imaging that emerged from the period, that no other moment in South African journalism (or photography) has eclipsed it. From a reading of English literature course entries, some might think that journalism in South Africa stopped when Drum had passed its primo in the mid1960s. Drum became the most widely read magazine in Africa at the time. A 1959 TIME article, entitled 'Drum beat in Africa', stated that 240 000 copies of Drum were distributed across Africa, to countries like Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The magazine was so popular, in fact, that illiterate people allegedly paid educated friends to read them the magazine. What Drum launched, of course, was a whole generation of engaging writers and cultural workers whose sociology of everyday township life became the model for many disciplines. That their output was written during apartheid, and that they were nevertheless able to generate their stories, photography and act in films like Come back Africa (1959), is testimony to the idea that even the most repressed can tackle their conditions through creativity, resilience and intelligence. Adversity generates the best in people: they create, they cooperate and they generate--ideas, stories, histories, and so on. It is in these kinds of moments that journalism becomes a means to a social end. Journalists and photographers change the world. Think of the pictures of war and how single photographs have rattled the global conscience: * The young naked girl burned with agent orange, fleeing towards the camera during the war in Vietnam; * The picture of Hector Pieterson being carried horizontally during the Soweto uprising; * The Kevin Carter photograph of a baby in Rwanda desperately trying to get to a place of safety as a nearby vulture eyes it; * And, the euphoria as we saw Nelson Mandela for the first time in 26 years in February 1990. Who can fail to be affected by such evocative, historically significant images? Photographers always take sides, they don't just take pictures. And, if they think they are just picture takers, then I would refer you all to the film Under fire, where the photographer changes his defensive catchphrase: 'I don't take sides, I just take pictures.' The pictures, he learns, 'take sides', even as they are appropriated by different constituencies struggling for different--even opposing--outcomes. Photographers are part of what they document; they also often pay the price for their compassion. Kevin Carter committed suicide soon after he took the picture of the baby and the vulture. Many reporters have paid the price of their profession they are shot, captured, assassinated, jailed, threatened and interrogated. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that reporters, journalists and photographers have more than just a theoretical understanding of the idea of human rights and social justice. …