It is a winter’s day in June 1950 and a young, dapperly dressed 19-year-old finds himself in a “Whites Only” train compartment on the journey from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The only other passenger in the compartment is a “middle aged, white-haired, well-dressed man” who introduces himself in Afrikaans, a language the young immigrant cannot understand, as he explains in broken English to his travelling companion. When he tells the man that he has just arrived from Germany, his fellow passenger becomes increasingly friendly. He explains that he is Hans van Rensburg, commander general of the Ossewabrandwag and an admirer of Hitler and the Nazi regime, under which the young man grew up and whose long post-war shadow he has sought to escape by coming to South Africa.
As Jürgen Schadeberg would recall this incident in his 2017 memoir The Way I See It, “I was sharing a train compartment with a man who sounded just like one of the demented members of the Nazi Party I had been forced to listen to until the very end of the war. I could hardly believe that I was hearing the same type of extreme language once more, and from someone who was seemingly well educated. I remember having a sinking feeling in my stomach that matched my rage at his approval of people like Hitler and Goring and their lunatic and lethal ideas. How could anyone possibly say such things after a war during which millions of people were killed and millions of others had been terribly pressed?”
It was a rude, sharp introduction to an extreme version of the racist, white supremacist views that Schadeberg would soon see expressed everywhere around him in the country to which he had followed his mother and stepfather. South Africa in the 1950s was, as the photographer who would become synonymous with capturing some of its most iconic images would later remember in an interview for a 2010 documentary, a land in which there were “two totally different cultures without any connection. The white society were the Boers, who in those days were racist against the blacks. They were completely prepared to build a White South Africa, without the blacks. The blacks must leave. And there was the black society, which was much more interesting since it looked more towards the future, developed itself and was dynamic.”
It was to black society, with its fierce individual expression in the face of unimaginable hardship and oppression, vibrant music and characters, that Schadeberg found himself almost instantly drawn. Within a year of his arrival in South Africa he would find himself working as the single photographer and artistic director of The African Drum magazine in Johannesburg. Shortly before, the publication’s new owner Jim Bailey had transformed it from a paternalistic purveyor of African stereotypes into a magazine catering for the political and cultural expressions and aspirations of black South African readers. It was Schadeberg, with his colleague and friend “Mr Drum” Henry Nxumalo, who found himself fulfilling the role of chief documentarian of the heady, messy, sometimes hopeful and ultimately terrible early-apartheid era of South African life, from the 1950s to the imprisonment of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in 1964.
When we think of this time, it is often Schadeberg’s images of the singers, jazz musicians, writers and gangsters of Sophiatown, as well as the young leaders of the ANC’s defiance campaigns such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, that are part of our visual references. Schadeberg was not an overtly political man, but he was certainly guided by an aversion towards fascism and authoritarianism. He had developed this growing up in Nazi Germany and it led him to become a young man who was, as journalist Robert von Lucius would describe him in a 2008 essay, “[u]ninhibited, unconventional, cunning, unprejudiced [and] passionate”.
Schadeberg’s place in the history of South African photography was firmly established not only by the pictures he took at Drum in the 1950s, and later as a freelancer in the early 1960s, but also by the skills and techniques he imparted to a new generation of black photographers, including Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani, Alf Khumalo and Ernest Cole. They would go on to document the difficult fortunes of the country in the decades to come in their own distinctive and iconic ways.
However, he was also much more than merely a lucky young man with a good eye who happened to find himself in an extraordinary place at a momentous time. The work from his estimated 200 000 negatives archive increasingly demonstrated this during the last decades of his life, before his death on Saturday 29 August at the age of 89.
Schadeberg skillfully depicted the humanity within the seemingly mundane details of everyday, often working-class life, and the stark contradictions between races and classes that he had been exposed to in South Africa. His work in the Gorbals of Glasgow in the late 1960s, the working-class, culturally diverse suburbs of Brixton and Hackney in 1970s London, and the marketplaces and capitals of post-independence west Africa and east Africa taken during a mammoth cross-continental hitchhiking trip in 1973 all stand alone as distinctive and moving testaments to a shared humanity and a lifelong dedication to capturing it with his camera.
“Mainly the daily, the common, partly the boring that we come across every day but which we don’t see any more since it’s so mundane, so boring and forgotten. I’m more interested in this than anything else,” he said in the 2010 documentary Schadeberg: Black and White.
From Berlin to Johannesburg
Jürgen Schadeberg was born in Berlin in 1931, the only son of his impish and bohemian mother Rosemarie, who raised him as a single parent and instilled in him a healthy incredulity towards authority, a strong sense of independence and a love of music, in particular jazz. Soon after the end of the war, in 1947, Rosemarie met and married an English officer and the couple immigrated to South Africa, leaving a teenaged Jürgen to fend for himself as he pursued photographic studies in Berlin and then worked in Hamburg for the German Press Agency.
Increasingly dismayed by what he saw as continued evidence of Nazism, “deeply ingrained in the German character”, Schadeberg left to join his mother in South Africa in 1950. He applied for work at several of Johannesburg’s daily newspapers, but was turned down and ridiculed for his use of a small Leica camera by a photographic community that favoured large, cumbersome equipment and staged shots over documentary photojournalism. By the time he walked into the offices of The African Drum in 1951, Schadeberg was ready and only too eager to begin documenting the contradictions of the strange but fascinating world around him.
In the course of his short but prolific period at Drum, Schadeberg produced a plethora of iconic images ranging from staged shoots to documentary work that saw him meet and become friends with a wide cross-section of South African liberal society. They included jazz musicians like Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Gwigwi Mrewbi, writers such as Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Es’kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, and young lions of the ANC like Mandela and Sisulu – all of whom were captured by Schadeberg’s ever-present and keenly curious lens.
With the forced removals and destruction of Sophiatown in 1955, the death of Nxumalo in 1957, the horrors of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, and the trial and imprisonment of Mandela and the other leaders of the ANC at the Rivonia Trial, Schadeberg began to become increasingly disillusioned by the rise of a new, brutal, deadly and authoritarian apartheid state. As his ability to move around and take photographs began to be more frequently hampered by the regime’s security police, he made the decision to leave the country in 1964.
He spent the majority of the next two decades working in England, Europe and the United States for a variety of international newspapers and magazines and teaching photography students before he and his third wife, Claudia, made the decision to return to South Africa in 1985, believing that significant democratic changes were on the horizon. When the newly elected President Mandela returned to visit his former cell on Robben Island in 1994, it was Schadeberg who captured the legendary photograph of the statesman looking stoically out of the cell bars, contemplating the hopeful uncertainties of the country’s post-apartheid future.
Photographing the present’s contradictions
Schadeberg continued to photograph the contradictions and inequalities of the post-apartheid landscape, producing a series of works on the lives of farm labourers and owners in the country and the daily lives of the residents of Kliptown, Johannesburg’s oldest township. He and Claudia also produced a series of documentary film projects on the history of South African music, the Drum era and the ANC.
But by 2007 Schadeberg felt disillusioned. As he told his documentary interviewers while lamenting the continuities of racial classification, while “we all believed in the rainbow nation… maybe we were too naïve, we expected that everything would be good instantly, all is great, the struggle is over. But it isn’t like that.” After a total of 36 years living in South Africa, he left his adopted country that year, having suddenly come to the realisation that in spite of his love for the continent, he was “not an African”.
He continued to take photographs, produce books and exhibit widely in Germany and the rest of the world, winning several accolades, including an Officer’s Cross (Verdienstkreuz) First Class award from the German government, a lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography in New York and an honorary doctorate from the University of Valencia in Spain, where he lived in the mountain village of La Drova from 2013 until his death.
As tributes poured in across social media for his life and work, it was the images from the Drum and Sophiatown era that dominated and served to remind us of the enduring contribution that Schadeberg undoubtedly and indelibly made to our visual history. An examination of all his work will only serve to provide further evidence of his singular ability to use the camera as a tool for capturing the brief moments in time that will stand as reminders of the rich lived experience of ordinary people in tumultuous social and historical moments. As he said in the documentary, “What I love about photography is that you take a photograph and five minutes later it’s history. It means you’re making history.”
Schadeberg is survived by Claudia and their son Charlie as well as five children from two previous marriages, 15 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.