Iconic images are often associated with political and cultural events in history; they are the images which help to shape our view of the world. Jürgen Schadeberg and Steve Schapiro are two photographers involved in creating those images over a period of six decades in South Africa and the United States respectively. They may not be household names but, as Eleanor O’Kane and Sean Samuels discovered, both photographers have found themselves shooting events which have changed our lives.
From his home in the Normandy countryside, Jürgen Schadeberg is tellingme about his induction into French village life three years ago. “After we moved here, two ladies came to the door with a parcel containing a bottle of champagne, a box of biscuits and an invitation to a dinner and dance in the village. Apparently everyone in the village over the age of 65 gets this,” he says, as if he still can’t quite believe it. “It’s quite normal here.”
More than 60 years after moving from his native Germany to Johannesburg, where he became known as ‘the father of South African photography’ for nurturing the first generation of black photographers, he is still touched by the sense of social inclusion that he finds in rural France.
Born in Berlin in 1931, Jürgen was apprenticed to the German PressAgency in Hamburg, and was taken under the wing of a photojournalist who taught him the basic elements of photography.Arriving in Johannesburg at the age of 20, where the system of legal racial segregation known as apartheid was in its formative years, the young German found freelance work at the newly relaunched Drum magazine, one of the few publications at the time aimed at a black readership. In its previous form the magazine had depicted the black population in either tribal or folksy settings; however, Jürgen’ s arrival coincided with a new editorship and policy of highlighting the cultural, political and social lives of SouthAfrica’ s urban black population. “Drum was the first and the only one to really take an interest in the black world rather than the white world,” he explains. “It was pretty different.” For him and many others, the relaxed, colour-blurred atmosphere of the Drum offices was a world away from the rules and regulations that governed public life under apartheid. One of the few whites on the editorial team, his experience and knowledge – limited though it was – proved crucial to the magazine in its early years. “When I arrived inAfrica I was a one-eyed man among the blind. There was no history of documentary or photojournalism in South Africa and among the black population there was no history of photography at all. They never had the opportunities or finances to get into it.”
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