" Lights, Camera, Fire."
A Photographic
Exhibition with images by Afrapix photographers:
Cedric Nunn, Rafs Mayet
and Deseni Soobben
All
three photographers were contributors to Afrapix Photo Agency in the eighties.
This exhibition – far from being a comprehensive overview of the important role
Afrapix played in communicating and archiving key years in South Africa’s
transition – is more of a selection of photographs by the three photographers
combining images not covered by the mainstream media of the day. Interspersed
with the social commentary are personal photographs - the exhibition is both a
personal and the political narrative of a South African prior to the first
democratic general elections.
“This
exhibition is a smaller fore-taste of a bigger, more comprehensive exhibition
by the KZN branch of Afrapix which is happening to coincide with 20 years of
democracy next year. This will include the work of people like Pax
Magwaza; Billy Paddock; Omar Badsha; Jeeva Rajgopaul; Myron Peters and others,”
says Rafs Mayet..
Afrapix
was a national collective of progressive photographers. They had a KZN office
in Omar Badsha’s darkroom in Good Hope Centre in Queen / Denis Hurley Street.
“Afrapix
was a photographic collective that operated for most of the eighties and tried
to cover the stories and realities of life back then, especially that which was
ignored by the mainstream media. We did a lot of work for a broad range of
organizations that were opposed to Apartheid - including political, religious,
cultural, media, sporting and a host of others as can be evidenced by the photo
of the first march in Durban in September 1989. Besides this kind of work
we also had our own projects going on at the same time. This was really a form
of release and relief from what we were experiencing on a daily basis. I found
refuge in documenting musicians especially at the Rainbow jazz club in Pinetown
- a mission that I'm still busy with to this day,” says Mayet.
“I'm
not ashamed of the epithet "Struggle Photographer" that gets applied
to us and our work as I feel that we, in our own small way, contributed to the
relative freedom that we all enjoy today!” he said.
Deseni
Soobben is currently a lecturer with Durban University of Technology
Journalism Dept at City Campus. Her work with Afrapix included photographs of the
emerging UDF, violence torn KZN midlands, civil protest action which were
distributed across the world. She worked at City Press with S’bu Mngadi and
Fred Khumalo and started lecturing at DUT when it was still ML Sultan. Her
specialist areas of interest are photography, media, culture and gender - and
to this end has based her master’s research dissertation on the photographic
representation of women in the print media.
Cedric
Nunn was one of the prominent photographers documenting the resistance against
apartheid in the 1980s. In 1994 he was part of a team of photographers
documenting South Africa’s first democratic election for the Independent
Electoral Commission. From 1998 to 2000 he served as director of the Market
Photography Workshop in Johannesburg. He teaches and mentors local and foreign
photography students and serves on the board of the Bensusan Museum of
Photography in Johannesburg. He has also taught at the Wits School of the
Arts, New York University Tisch School of Arts exchange programme and the
School for International Training.
Rafique (Rafs) Mayet has
explored a myriad jobs – including producing for Capital Radio. In 1983 Omar
Badsha taught him the basics of photography and he started working on the Daily
Dispatch in East London, the New African in Durban and he became a member of Afrapix. He has
participated in numerous exhibitions – in South Africa and abroad. He also
worked for the IEC during the first election in 1994. He is perhaps best known
for capturing moments of musical brilliance – especially in the genre of jazz.
He has been a recipient of a Too
Little Too Late Award from
CFAD.
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