Schadeberg, Jurgen 1931-

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SCHADEBERG, Jurgen 1931-

PERSONAL: Born March 18, 1931, in Berlin, Germany; son of Rosemary Hammond (an actress); married Claudia Horvath, 1984; children: Charlie, Wolfgang, Martine, Frankie, Bonnie, Leon. Education: Attended School of Optics and Phototechnics, Berlin, Germany, 1946-47.

ADDRESSES: Home—21 Kangnussie Rd., Randburg, Transvaal, South Africa. E-mail—schadebe@iafrica. com.

CAREER: Photographer and photojournalist, editor, tutor, and director. Apprentice for German Press Agency, Hamburg, Germany, 1948-50; photographer and picture editor, Drum magazine, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1951-59. Freelance photographer for publications including Johannesburg Sunday Times, London Sunday Times, Observer, Telegraph, New Society, Marketing, Architectural Journal, Campaign, and Hamburg Die Zeit. Camera Owner (magazine), London, England, editor, 1964-65. Central School of Art and Design, London, part-time tutor, 1973-80. Newport Art College, Wales, tutor, 1983. Director of films together with wife Claudia Schadeberg, including Have You Seen Drum Recently? 1987; War & Peace: A History of the ANC, 1989; The Seven Ages of Music, 1992; Voices from Robben Island, 1994; Dolly & the Ink Spots, 1994; Jo'burg Cocktail, 1995; Hail the Women, 1996; Ernest Cole, 1999; and Deadline, 2000. Exhibitions: Individual exhibitions include the Gallery, Allo Castello, Spain, 1969; Kalahari Bushmen, La Palette Bleu, Paris, France, 1970; Kalahari Bushmen, Woodstock Gallery, London, 1971; Faces, Air Gallery, London, 1979; Central School of Art and Design, London, 1980; the Photographers' Gallery, London, 1981; A Retrospective, Market Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1988; Sof 'town Blues, Photographers' Gallery, London, 1995; African Women, Nantes, France, 1996; 'Fifties South Africa, Vue d'Afrique Festival, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1998; and The Berlin Wall, Goethe Institute, Johannesburg, 1998. Selected group exhibitions include Faces and Places, Adler Fielding Gallery, Johannesburg, 1962; Inside Whitechapel, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1976; The Quality of Life, National Theatre, London, 1976; Lives, Hayward Gallery, London, 1979; The Finest Photos from the Old Drum, Shell Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 1987; Under the Tropic: Twenty-fiveyears of South African Photojournalism, Cardiff University, Wales, 1998; Maverick, Crake Gallery, Johannesburg, 1999; Lengthening Shadows, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2000; Soweto: A South African Legend, Munich, Germany, 2001; Drum Beat South Africa 1950-1994, Axis Gallery, New York, NY, 2001; The Black and White Fifties, 2001; Soweto Today, 2001; Moving Stills Over Fifty Years, Goethe Institut, Johannesburg, 2002; The San of the Kalahari 1959, touring South Africa, 2003; Jazz Images over Fifty-two Years, Standard Bank Art Gallery, 2003; South Africa over Fifty-two Years, Goethe Institut, Berlin, Germany, 2003. Works included in collections of Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

WRITINGS:

(Photographer) Jurgen Schadeberg (exhibition catalogue), introduction by Tom Hopkinson, Photographers' Gallery (London, England), 1981.

(Photographer) George Hulme, The Kalahri Bushmen Dance, [London, England], 1982.

(Editor and compiler) The Fifties People of South Africa: The Lives of Some Ninety-five People Who Were Influential in South Africa During the Fifties, a Period Which Saw the First Stirrings of the Coming Revolution, photographs by Bob Gosani and others, Bailey's African Photo Archives (South Africa), 1987.

(Editor) The Finest Photos from the Old Drum, Bailey's African Photo Archives (Lanseria, South Africa), 1987.

(Editor) Benson Dyantyi and others, Nelson Mandela and the Rise of the ANC, photographs by Ian Berry and others, J. Ball (Parklands, South Africa), 1990.

(Editor and photographer) Voices from Robben Island, notes by Nelson Mandela, historical records and prisoner interviews by Mary Benson, Ravan Press (Randburg, South Africa), 1994.

Sof'town Blues: Images from the Black '50s, African Book Centre (Nedbank, Hurleyvale), 1994.

The Black and White Fifties, Protea Book House (Pretoria, South Africa), 2002.

Soweto Today, Protea Book House (Pretoria, South Africa), 2002.

The San of the Kilahari 1959, Protea Book House (Pretoria, South Africa), 2002.

Photo Album over Fifty-two Years, Protea Book House (Pretoria, South Africa), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Photographer and photojournalist Jurgen Schadeberg described his choice of life work this way in Contemporary Photographers: "I was born in 1931 and grew up in Berlin during the war. Stunned, I emerged from the ruins of the wrecked city and decided to become a photographer." To this end, the fifteen year old attended the School for Optic and Phototechnic in Berlin for a year and went on to apprentice at the German Press Agency in Hamburg for two years after that. In 1950, at age nineteen, Schadeberg went to Johannesburg, South Africa, and got a job with Drum magazine. Apartheid was in full force, and Drum was a unique publication: a primarily black-staffed magazine aimed at black readers. Schadeberg was one of Drum's few white photographers, and during the ten years he was with the publication, he documented key events in the antiapartheid movement, such as the Defiance Campaign of 1953, the Treason Trial in 1956, the Sophiatown removals in 1958, and the Sharpeville Funeral of 1960. He also photographed black leaders Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Trevor Huddlestone, Walter Sisulu, and Govan Mbeki before and after they were imprisoned on Robben Island for their antiapartheid activities. The picture he took in 1952 of Mandela in his law office that he shared with Tambo is the only existing record of that law office.

But Schadeberg also captured daily life and culture in the black townships, especially the lively jazz scene in Sophiatown and jazz legends Dolly Rathebe, Kippie Moeketsi, Thandi Klaasens, Miriam Makeba, and Dorothy Masuka. Schadeberg helped train several black photographers who became famous in their own right, including Peter Magubane. Magubane recalled in Contemporary Photographers that Schadeberg was "very good at taking pictures and very strict to those like me who were learning." Although Magubane frequently had to sleep at the Drum office because he had no way of getting home, "I did not mind because all the time I was learning from him." On his Web page, Schadeberg reflected on his experience of working in 1950s South Africa: "I found two societies running in parallel with each other without any communication. . . . The Black World . . . was culturally and economically rejected by the White World. Only servants and menial workers could enter . . . In the fifties, the Black World was becoming culturally and politically very dynamic, whereas the White World seemed to me to be isolated, cocooned, colonial, and ignorant of the Black World. . . . My images from the vibrant fifties Black World, 'the rejected society,' have been extensively covered in South Africa because I felt it was important that both blacks and whites should see what the Verwoerdian ideology had successfully destroyed."

In 1959 Schadeberg went on a trip organized by the University of the Witwatersrand to see the bushman tribe in the Kalahari desert known as the San People. Noted expedition leader Professor Tobias in Contemporary Photographers, Schadeberg's photos of their Dance of Exorcism "portray, as has never been portrayed before, some aspects of life among the little hunters. . . . This is where art and science lose their bounds and meet: for these pictures are priceless scientific documents no less than photographic works of highest artistry." A retrospective from Schadeberg's South Africa photographs earned this comment from a London Times reviewer: "The results . . . are striking and frequently moving. . . . the majority of pictures capture the less well-known faces of apartheid."

After leaving Drum, Schadeberg stayed in South Africa and continued taking pictures as a freelancer for several publications another four years. He moved to London in 1964 and edited Camera Owner magazine for a year before turning again to freelance photojournalism for another three years. From 1968 to 1972 he lived and worked in Spain, also trying his hand at painting and experimenting with the use of color in both media.

In the early 1970s Schadeberg returned twice to Africa, taking pictures for Christian Aid on one trip and hitchhiking from Senegal and Mali, along the continent's west coast, and across Zaire and Kenya to Tanzania on the other. He said of this trek in Contemporary Photographers, "My aim was to show the life of Africa apart from its two stereotypes—the primitive life of villages and tribesman, and the violence which so many cameramen set out to look for. I wanted to show the Africa of the marketplace, the towns, the life of the dusty roads with their bus stops and river crossings."

From 1973 to 1980 Schadeberg held a position at the Central School of Art and Design in London, interacting with student groups in different types of workshops that resulted in two successful exhibitions: Inside Whitechapel, in 1973, in which professionals and students teamed up to produce the photographs, and The Quality of Life, in 1976, which showed the work of students from all over the world who lived together in a converted warehouse that was their home, workshop, studio, and darkroom. In the early part of the 1980s, Schadeberg continued freelancing for a variety of magazines from England, the United States, and Germany, but in 1985, he returned to South Africa. He sifted through tens of thousands of Drum negatives, compiling them into various exhibits, books, and films. He also continued taking pictures of Nelson Mandela, both before and after Mandela was released from Robben Island. The photo Schadeberg took of Mandela looking through the bars of his Robben cell in 1994 was voted one of the fifty most memorable images of the twentieth century by London's Photographers Gallery.