House of Bondage

Last July, I caught myself combing the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, up and down a slight, rickety elevator in this former textile warehouse between exhibitions. I had trekked into the theme-park of Central London to see the work of two bona fide ‘heavy hitters’ of 20th century photography. 

The first was a vivid tapestry of Gaciela Iterbide’s most iconic works, Shadowlines – beautiful oneiric shots of her native Mexico (e.g., ‘Angelitos’) and group portraits of the White Fence barrio in late ‘80s Los Angeles. Iterbide’s portraiture, of which some of the most visually striking instances feature in her photo essay ‘Juchitán of the Women’ (1979-86), portrays deeply effective, haunting, and textured manipulations of light. Her photos reveal a ‘way of seeing’ (employing John Berger’s critic-speak) into the souls of her subjects which others rarely capture. Anyone can take photos, but there are very few photographers in this sense: The fabric of expressions are immortalised. They reach far into the contexts and experiences presented. It is not that photos like Iterbide’s are worth a thousand words, or that words are devalued in comparison, but her photos contain an immediate manner of language. A good photo, like a good book, contains multitudes. 

There was a consensus on social media last year which underlined this point, pertaining to the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and particularly the output of pro-Palestine social media accounts such as Eye On Palestine as well as the personal reports of journalists and civilians evidencing the ongoing onslaught. I have no one statement to quote here since thousands of people reiterated similar sentiments across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (or ‘X’, if you must), and TikTok, unilaterally expressing a legitimate sense of revulsion at the coverage (or lack thereof) of Israeli war crimes in our mainstream press–particularly in light of the transparency which social media provides. To summarise the sentiment widely expressed: Imagine the atrocities against Palestine’s native population that took place without condemnation before we could see them on our screens.

True enough, Israel has committed horrors and terrors in Gaza with immunity and express support from allies despite scrupulous documentation, photos, and video evidence. It is relatively unmoved by its all-time low approval rating in countries like Britain, also among many British Jews, continuing its barbarous and expensive campaigns with the financial/munitional backing of, yes, countries like Britain. But it still matters that the public has seen these images. It is a transparency refuted by the purportedly impartial BBC, whose staff is reportedly in active revolt over the company’s lacklustre commitment to their impartial mandate, and newspapers, which – as Robin Williams once said of politicians – ought to wear their sponsors like NASCAR drivers so the public knows who owns them. It’s sadly true that too many things are obscured by the misuses of language, or altogether forgotten. Names, figures, schools and hospitals levelled by bombs; children targeted by drones, or in the deceptive designator ‘safe zone’. (Most mainstream Western news outlets are guilty of cherry-picking, filtering information, and opting in the way of dissonance when confronted by facts.) In the most direct manner, however, photos remember. 

Last summer’s coverage of Gaza was particularly active. The ICJ’s landmark ruling on the unlawful occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, made ripples on 19th July. It coincided with the most fervent pro-Palestine discourse witnessed since late 2023 in Britain, online, in the encampments, and across multiple campaigns which led to the elections of five independent MPs running on a ceasefire vote, including the inexhaustible anti-apartheid candidate Jeremy Corbyn, who together accumulated more than 300,000 votes at the general election. 

It seems like a long time ago. I remember hearing about the decision of the Photographers’ Gallery, during these months, to revitalise Ernest Cole’s essential 1967 photobook about the experiences of black South Africans in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the second exhibition which brought me on the pilgrimage down to Oxford Circus last July. Much has been made of the comparisons between apartheid South Africa, now thirty years outlawed though the tracery of segregation still showing, with present-day Palestine. This may be Nelson Mandela’s belief that South Africa could not be free as long as Palestine was occupied, or Noam Chomsky’s criticism that the civic status of Palestinians is less than that of black South Africans under apartheid, because the latter were relied on for labour, and so had some form of labour power. The legacies of apartheid have been a dominant theme in left-wing media especially – not least the Summer 2024 issue of Tribune, which included a range of essays on apartheid focusing, for example, on the relationship between British industrial relations and the global movement for divestment in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Intentional or not, this Cole exhibition, House of Bondage, was disturbingly prescient and felt like an oppositional statement to our reactionary temper as a nation with regards to the Israel-Hamas ‘war’. 

In many ways, Cole was the ideal documentary photographer. His stills were  both quiet and explosive, incorporating elements of portrait, street, and architectural photography. He encapsulated the realities of everyday life under apartheid, across urban areas to the radically deprived townships where black South Africans were forcibly relocated in the 1950s. Cole is especially interested in institutions and state apparatuses like schools, where the ideology of servitude was propagated to black children after the Bantu Education Act (1953), and job sites with inadequate working conditions. Cole forces your gaze to overcrowded classrooms, as dozens of black children are forced into cramped and stifling areas, crowded by extension into the 35mm frame of the image. You are then diverted by the  resentful glare of a boy pressing notes onto a chalkboard, dictated by an educator who loathes the syllabus as does her student. The whites of the boy’s eyes are the focus. Spotlit by shadows. The image tells its spectator a story: actually, the boy is bored by what he’s learning; politically, the racist subordination of the  classroom grinds his humanity away; symbolically, he signifies his oppressive social context. Like many successful photographs – following Susan Sontag – Cole’s photos instantly communicate a tangible world of real people and real-world injustices. They also demand an immediate response from the viewer, whether emotionally or intellectually, which can be experienced by anyone. Photos like Cole’s remind me of the Jewish precept which equates one human life with the entire world. His subjects are a whole society, a fringe, a means of everyday existence. They are the world entirely.

The communicative power of photography is also on display in the masterpiece Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, one of the anti-apartheid plays devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona with the Serpent Players in the early ‘70s. The play is mainly set in a photography studio in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, where a man called Sizwe Bansi is photographed, but who instead gives the name ‘Robert Zwelinzima’ to accompany his deposit. After he is photographed, we are presented with the live creation of a frozen image – the chronicle of Sizwe’s backstory is subsequently conjured, following his unsuccessful search for employment and, fearing the conditions of the mines, how he stole the identity of a dead man (Robert Zwelinzima) with a work-seeker’s permit. We return to the photography studio at the close. As with all Fugard dramas, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead can be called many things because of its diverse psychological, political, and aesthetic elements. It includes aspects of absurdist theatre, black comedy, and avant-gardism which challenge the purity of theatrical form. It’s a play about apartheid. It’s a play about work – the lack of it, the need for it. It’s about death, and the deathward trajectory of so many black lives under these conditions. And it’s about photography, arising in Fugard’s fascination with a studio photograph he once saw and desired to reproduce mechanically on stage. Fugard is  concerned with the centrality of the actor’s physical presence on stage, who in the best of times works as an engine of communication. In Sizwe Bansi they bring live performance and the plasticity of the photgraph’s medium into contact. Lurking behind the photograph is a multitude, as the play reveals, and as Cole’s photography relentlessly reminds us.

The photos in House of Bondage are monochrome to stunning effect, with entrancing depths of focus, textured contrasts, and chiaroscuro. The immediacy of these images was disrupted, however, by the Photographers’ Gallery, to its discredit, whose language accompanying the portrayals of apartheid veered far too past tense to convince those of us who inferred their modern-day prescience.  Indeed, it is important to appreciate the power of photography like Cole’s not just as a political instrument for future generations, as much as a magnifying glass for contemporary issues. When approaching an exhibition of apartheid photography – if you are privileged enough to spare the £8 entry fee – we must reckon with these  images as windows into a past state of barbarism, as a means of tearing back the eyelids of Brits to see what we think we know (but do not), but also as a way of seeing the world today. What do Cole’s photos tell us about the world today? How do the conditions resemble those experienced by Palestinian Muslims and Christians, the vast population of Muslims living in India, or the current situation of black South Africans still relegated to the margins of society? When we see a photo from 1967 of a black child being beaten by a white man on a side street in Cape Town and we do not ask these questions, we succumb to Sontag’s well-known reservation that photography diminishes and contorts world events too much. To see unthinkingly reduces us to voyeurs, to social sleepwalkers. It is our obligation to the legacies of the past that we look carefully at these photographs and allow them to sufficiently haunt the present, so that we might re-sensitise our culture to the bombardment of crisis-imagery. A photo of Gaza flattened beyond words is a mirror of the present crisis, a tissue of failure across decades. It is a picture of the world entirely.