ABSTRACT
In visiting Windermere, Bryan Heseltine brought his photography into the ambit of momentous social and political forces shaping life for black South Africans living at the Cape, specifically the process of rapid urbanization and the politics of racist segregation. Like a number of photographers who had a significant impact on South African photography in the post-war and early apartheid years, Heseltine had strong connections to Europe, a fact that is significant both for his practice and the later history of the collection. The image of the laughing man comes from a collection of photographs made in and around Cape Town, South Africa, between the late 1940s and 1952, by the photographer Heseltine. The role of the curator is unlike that of the historian; the task is not so much to recount the event as to 'prolong' it, to hold the photograph open to the present.
