Morolong (1928 2012) was a street and portrait photographer who worked in East London, South Africa, in the mid-twentieth century, capturing images of everyday life in the townships: people in shops, on the beach, playing music, travelling, celebrating.
His work was re-discovered during the land restitution process in the East and West Bank communities in East London (1999-2002) when the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) allowed claimants to help prove their cases through the use of photographs of their former homes.
In all of these images, it is a quality of zest and pleasure, of ease of mind and body, which author and cultural analyst Ashraf Jamal sees as most striking. That there is absolutely no unsettlement in the images, he comments, no qualification of the underside of these worlds the history of black South African oppression is a chastening corrective to the image repertoire which has largely framed and defined black experience in the 1950s and 1960s.
The ordinariness of the scenes we see in Morolongs images garners a strong empathic response, stemming from what Jamal describes as the photographers unique ability to reconfigure what we conventionally understand to be black experience in an incontrovertible time of oppression.
A monograph celebrating the life and work of Morolong is available from the gallery, with texts by Ashraf Jamal, Lipuo Morolong & Claire McNulty.
- Book condition: Very Good
- Softcover: 96 pages.
- Weight: Under 1kg.
- Dimensions: 20 cm x 20 cm x 1cm
