The Tyranny of the Visual: Alex La Guma and the Anti-Apartheid Documentary Image

This essay has three major aims: first, to understand how the visual image articulated in both textual and photographic media constituted a crucially important element of South African apartheid resistance efforts of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Second, to investigate the ways in which Alex La Guma and three fellow anti-apartheid activists working in critical documentary photography—Peter Magubane, David Goldblatt, and Omar Badsha—used the image in order to critique the tyranny of visual hegemonies, particularly those that enunciated a materialist standard from which non-white South Africans were excluded. And third, to complicate recent La Guma criticism that has excised the image from its surrounding narrative trajectories. What La Guma and these photographers achieved made for powerful leverage against apartheid's putative control of the visual realm.