Peter Magubane became a photojournalist in 1954 to fight apartheid. He discovered that camera skills were only the beginning.
To cover a revolution, a photographer has to be as brave as its participants, and as tough and cagey as a guerilla warrior. A lifetime of photographs sampled at Spruill Gallery suggests he was.
They plant us in the thick of the Soweto Uprising, where we feel the fervor and the fear of the demonstrators. They sneak us into the prison-like dormitories of mine workers
"At Drum [the magazine where he started his storied career], we did not believe in being told what to do," he says. "I couldn't go back to the office without making a picture. I had to find ways."
When the government banned the press from a demonstration in 1959, for example, Magubane disguised himself in raggedy clothes and hid his Leica in a hollowed-out loaf of bread. He pretended to be eating while he took the pictures.
Chutzpah was not a problem for a man who prided himself in flouting the South African system. But it didn't prepare him for the peaceful demonstration in 1960 that turned into the Sharpeville Massacre.
Witnessing the carnage after policemen fired into the crowd without warning, the photographer, who had never seen anyone shot, was stunned and briefly immobilized.
Far from sympathizing, his editor was upset that he hadn't gotten any close-ups of the victims. Says Magubane, "He told me, 'In this business, you don't get shocked.' After this I changed. You get emotional when you get home."
Magubane visibly softens when talk turns to Nelson Mandela, whose life he has chronicled since he covered his treason trial in 1956. He watched Mandela's transformation from flamboyant lawyer to serious leader and finally international hero.
"He is saint, father, brother, comrade," says Magubane, whose photo biography "Man of the People" (Pan Macmillan South Africa) —- from which the gallery show is drawn —- came out this year.
Upon Mandela's release in 1990, Magubane became his official photographer. The color photographs at Spruill record his public and private moments —- from his triumphant 1990 visit to the United States to giving his daughter away at her wedding in 1992.
To see Mandela with Rosa Parks and the King family is to see the parallel trajectories of America and South Africa. Magubane says, "Segregation and apartheid are two names for the same thing."
Like the photographers who covered the American civil rights movement (featured at the High through Oct. 5), Magubane risked life and limb for his work. He endured imprisonment, including solitary confinement for 586 days. He was shot in the leg and suffered a fractured nose courtesy of a police baton.
He spent five years under house arrest, banned from practicing his profession and dependent on Amnesty International to feed his family.
Was it worth it? Yes, he says, without hesitation.
"A struggle without documentation is no struggle."
"Nelson Mandela: Man of the People —- Photographs by Peter Magubane"
Through Nov. 8. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. Spruill Gallery, 681 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Dunwoody. 770-394-3447. www.spruillarts.org
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