The faces on the factory floor
For nearly four three decades the anonymous South African worker has had a determined chronicler in William Matlala, whose images are now on show
William Matlala was a factory worker in the early 1980s during the rise of the trade union movement. He worked in a packing plant, transferring condiments from tubs into sachets for use in restaurants — one of those jobs that most of us assume get done somehow, without thinking too much about who might be responsible.
Matlala was also a photographer, and he began to bring his camera to work, making extra money by taking photographs of his co-workers — at work in their uniforms, outside factory gates when they had knocked off, and sometimes at home and for special family occasions.
After leaving his job in the factory,
Matlala made his living as a street photographer in his hometown of Katlehong on the East Rand, before landing a job in 1989 as the official photographer for Cosatu, during a frenzied period of strikes, labour unrest and mass mobilisation.
As Matlala recalls: “In the 1980s when you saw images of workers in the newspapers, it was during strike action, and I thought, as a worker: ‘This is not the end of where workers are and there’s more to them than this.’ So it was then that I decided I should start working on the ‘workers at work’ project.”
Matlala left his job at Cosatu in 1993 and went to work for the Labour Bulletin before returning to freelance work, where he continued to document the everyday lives of workers on factory floors. He doggedly added to his “workers at work” project, which now covers over three decades of labour history in SA and consists of what he estimates is more than 250,000 photographs of workers in factories.
He is based at the Society, Work & Politics Institute at Wits University, and a small selection of around 40 photos from his vast archive have been selected in collaboration with Sally Gaule of the university’s School of Architecture & Planning for an exhibition that opened this weekend at the Apartheid Museum.
While some types of work have been covered within the archive of South African photography — mining, domestic work, the civil service — Gaule says she sees Matlala’s work as filling a missing space in its focus on factory workers. “What William’s images also show are elements of quite heavy industrial labour, which is in the process of disappearing,” says Gaule.
It may seem that the subject of workers at work is mundane and of little interest to anyone except Matlala and those captured by his camera, but, as Gaule hopes the photos in the exhibition will demonstrate, “William’s photographs show a remarkable degree of access and a knowledge and empathy about and with working people. As workers, most of us get up in the morning and go to work every day, and so the issue of looking at other workers is something you can connect with, no matter who you are, and that crosses race and class and income groups because of the way in which he has depicted his subjects.”
By focusing on individual workers — men and women going about their daily tasks as breadwinners, often under the harsh conditions imposed by an unjust system — Matlala gives faces to the people lumped together under the umbrella term of “workers” in reports about strike action or labour unrest or company production figures. His work reminds the viewer that “they” are more than an inconvenient collective noun — that “they” are human beings engaged in producing and supplying so many of the things taken for granted.
While the turbulent politics of the lateapartheid struggle often intruded onto the factory floor in strikes and protests,
Matlala’s purpose, although often finding itself dovetailing with factory floor politics, was not overtly political — even if, as he sees it now, “in SA at that time everything you did was political”. But, he says, “my main focus was to expose the day-to-day life of workers in the factory — of workers at work as my co-workers”.
Other photographers busied themselves with searching out the more dramatic evidence of the injustices of the apartheid regime. While Matlala’s work spans much of the same period as his more celebrated and recognised peers, Gaule says his photographs “eschew the spectacular for the ordinary and I think that’s quite, for the time, an interesting view of the world that was innovative and didn’t subscribe to the current ways of presenting images and looking at the world during apartheid when everybody was trying to be a struggle photographer”.
Gaule says the exhibition has not been constructed in terms of a grand narrative about the recent history of South African workers, but she hopes that viewers will see the value of Matlala’s work today in providing evidence of “how things have changed but also how they haven’t changed. And that kind of spectrum is a valuable way of looking back at history.”
For Matlala, the project that has occupied so much of his time and focus over the past few decades will always be not only an attempt to help audiences “understand and see what happens with workers on a day-today basis”, but also one that’s taken him on a personal journey that reflects his belief that “as a photographer, when you take photographs they become part of you, so wherever I’ve gone I’ve learnt different ways of doing jobs and of talking to people. It’s taught me how to talk to people and how to present myself to them.”
It’s taught me how to talk to people William Matlala, above On his photography
✼ Matlala’s photographic exhibition, The Complete Worker: Everyday Lives and Struggles of Black Workers 1983-2018, is at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg until October 20.