Peter Magubane: courageous photographer who chronicled South Africa's struggle for freedom

• The photographer suffered great losses during apartheid.
• He miraculously survived being shot 17 times below the waist at the funeral of a student activist in Natalspruit in 1985.
• Despite the pain and suffering he witnessed and experienced, Magubane’s photographs testify to the hope that is at the heart of the struggle for a just world.

Witness to momentous events

• He not only witnessed, but also took part in, many of the most significant events in modern South African history.
• Referred to as the “dompas”, the document was used to control and restrict the movement of black South Africans.
• His images focusing on life in the township were later to form the subject of several of his books.
• He soon began to work as a photographer under the tutelage of Drum’s chief photographer and picture editor, Jürgen Schadeberg.
• the events of that day produced the picture of the funeral as one of the central iconographic emblems of the anti-apartheid struggle.
• Her slender hands are beautiful, and their perfect smoothness accentuates the brutal rupture where her skin has been broken.

The archive

• In 2018 his work was exhibited in a major retrospective, On Common Ground, alongside that of another renowned South African photographer, David Goldblatt.
• He served as Nelson Mandela’s photographer from 1990 to 1994.
• Magubane’s indomitable spirit and compassionate vision live on through his work.

Kylie Thomas ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.