The eye that saw into a soul
The late Peter Magubane is known as a struggle photographer and ethnographer non pareil. But it was his comradeship with Winnie Mandela, the woman he loved in times of tumult, that gave rise to one of his masterpieces, writes
To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly. —
I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence. — Man Ray
Describing Stanley Kubrick, the filmmaker who started out as a photographer, Michael Herr wrote in his book Kubrick: “As for his eyes, dark and piercing, he looked out from a perceptibly deep place.”
Herr latched onto a key aspect of professional “seers”, in whatever medium they work. In film, photography and painting some see deeper and further; many among us merely look, and only a few see. Herr’s description of Kubrick might just as well apply to the unsettling gaze of alchemic seers and darkroom obsessives such as Peter Magubane.
In the days after his death, I heard two conflicting readings of Magubane, both of them apposite. At the memorial service held at the Regina Mundi church in Rockville, Soweto, a speaker described Magubane’s working humility as that of someone deeply considerate of those he photographed. “He would not just click on and ask for permission later. No, he was not that kind of a photographer,” this speaker said.
At the Bryanston Methodist Church,
Magubane saw all these conflicted selves. He also saw in her a beauty, power and vulnerability that went beyond a woman under statesponsored siege
colleagues and those he mentored eulogised him as a “struggle hero”. Here one of the speakers described how Magubane approached his subjects — he would set out the camera properly, look through the lens, then move an inch to look at his subject directly. “In that way he made a connection with the subject he was about to photograph.”
It is possible that both these tributes describe the late-style Magubane; he himself said on many occasions, “I shoot first and ask for permission later.”
He worked for five decades as a photographer, often flinging himself into dangerous and tumultuous scenes, oblivious to risk as he pursued the photograph that would best broadcast the condition of his people. Photographers are a rare breed, in that they are shaped by two instincts above all: what they see at that moment, and the quality of the light. Everything else is personal style, and the fact that they were in a particular place at a particular time.
The innate light that Magubane worked with, even in times of metaphorical darkness, shone at its most humane on Winnie Mandela.
Magubane loved her. But listening to and reading the tributes to him I was struck by a feeling that it seems to be verboten to recall the love and comradeship Magubane shared with Mandela — a complex, vulnerable and soul-stirringly selfless figure. To shirk the responsibility of painting a full picture of Magubane, in a rounded way, is an act of erasure and irresponsibility. To remember his life and work through a one-dimensional lens — as a brave warrior thrust into the heart of street skirmishes with white supremacy — is unsettling.
Magubane loved and was loved in return. Mandela was indeed flawed and complicated — we can never begin to imagine what she had to endure as a black woman leader and one of the most feared and reviled figures of our time. She was also the most self-sacrificing, unfiltered and honest politician in recent memory.
Magubane saw all these conflicted selves. He also saw in her a beauty, power and vulnerability that went beyond a woman under state-sponsored siege. She carried within her a vulnerability of a special weaving. A fragility of the soul, an inner child scarred, abandoned and mutilated. It is possible that Mandela was one of the most photographed women in the world. But she seldom revealed her inner self. Many gazed at her, few saw her.
About 13 years ago I was involved in a project with Alf Kumalo to curate photographs of Mandela; our focus was her contribution to the history of beauty, style and fashion. We were seized with the idea of style and fashion as a site of radical impulse.
We pored over images of her, in search of style. The mandate was to identify the most startling images and compose some notes about them. And we arrived at what is probably the most haunting photograph of Mandela I have ever seen; one we called The Crying Nun, shot by Magubane.
Although it has since been reproduced as a black and white photo, it was originally shot in colour. She’s draped in a nun-like outfit. Her lips are pursed and her ethnically indeterminate straight nose is lit almost in profile. The length of her nose and overall facial features are dramatised powerfully; the portrait has twice been used as a book cover.
On the cover of Anné Mariè du Preez Bezdrob’s biography, Winnie Mandela: A Life, the portrait is reproduced in deep contrast. It comes out a shade darker and feels like a black and white original. One side of her face is lit, the other is in shadow. Her pupils are dark and glistening — with suspended tears, perhaps?
The photo is also on the cover of Mandela’s 1985 ghostwritten memoir Part of My Soul Went With Him. This time the effect is less unsettling. It is a lighter, brighter version.
The Crying Nun is the one image that, in
its photographer’s empathy with the subject, pierces the façade to reveal a haunted, resigned and emotionally shredded spirit.
I have been trying to ascertain the date it was shot for a while now. Somehow, its emotive symbolism and weariness indicate it might have been shot in the mid- to late1970s; the time when Mandela and Magubane developed their activist comradeship. That was a time of unspeakable loneliness in her life. She was banished to Brandfort, a cold, desolate nowheresville. Magubane’s portrait is a picture of a sunken heart indeed. Years later, this portrait went on to be a poster for Pascale Lamché’s documentary Winnie.
Magubane photographed Mandela on many occasions over the more than five decades of their friendship. These shots include the Brandfort portraits in which she is photographed gaily standing at the gate of the township plot to which she was banished. Some, like those that featured her famous Volkswagen Beetle, have a much lighter emotional cast.
Some are playful or forlorn, others are of a contemporary woman who simply loved fashion. In some, public enemy No 1 of the time comes across as an ordinary woman: laughing, playful with her daughters, pulling faces, rolling her eyes, or weighed down by weariness and exhaustion.
Through Magubane’s lens, Mandela echoed one of Nina Simone’s tenderest of songs, Just Like a Woman. Magubane understood that her femininity mattered too. The Crying Nun gifted us the intricacy of Magubane’s way of seeing, which might otherwise be swallowed by smoke and fire and silenced by the sirens of history.