Available Light: Photography, Intimacy and Apartheid

This event is part of the Africa Research Workshop at Stanford University.

The Digital Civil Society Lab is pleased to co-sponsor a talk by Daniel Magaziner, Professor of African History, Yale University on Wednesday; October 16 (Building 200, Room 302, 5-7 pm). The talk is part of the Fall Quarter Africa Research Workshop and is open to all. All attendees are asked to read the pre-circulated paper prior to the event. To receive a copy, please email Prof Joel Cabrita, jcabrita@stanford.edu

Professor Magaziner’s paper is titled “Available Light: Photography, Intimacy; and Apartheid” and you can find an abstract below:

This talk considers the intellectual and artistic trajectory of Omar Badsha, an artist, photographer and organizer of Indian South African descent. Through Badsha’s life, it offers an intimate history of the struggle against apartheid, focusing especially on the role of media both in the struggle and in its memory.  Badsha was one the more important figures in a critical anti-apartheid photography collective known as Afrapix, and he is today the webmaster of South African History Online, the African continent’s preeminent online historical repository. The talk focuses especially on Badsha’s evolving relationship with the Inanda district in what is today KwaZulu-Natal, which was the epicenter of unfolding conflicts between various facets of South African society during the early 1980s and which became the subject of Badsha’s initiation photographic interventions. Yet Badsha is not a straightforwardly heroic figure in South Africa history; to know him and his story is to know the complications of living a political life during this time of extreme tension. This paper reflects on the personal, the political, and the professional both during and after this era.

Speakers

• Daniel Magaziner - Professor of African Studies, Yale University

Partners

Center for African Studies

More Info

All attendees are asked to read the pre-circulated paper prior to the event. To receive a copy, please email Prof Joel Cabrita, jcabrita@stanford.edu