ABSTRACT
This paper draws together into a conversation the two seemingly disparate languages of pictorial photography in salons and “native administration” in South Africa in the 1950s. A reading of Denfield’s pictorial photographs, which were taken in the 1950s throughout Basutoland, and which were exhibited internationally under the banner of the salons, is a useful starting point in unpacking how the concerns about “the native,” as articulated by ruling bodies, figured through photography. According to Hayes (2007, 140), pictorialism was established in South Africa from the turn of the twentieth century and found expression in salon exhibitions based largely on European trends. One of the participants of such organised activity is Joseph Denfield, a prolific photographer in the 1950s, who, nevertheless, is a little-known figure today. One encounters his work in the Africana Library of the East London Municipal Library, where in 1967 he donated some of his personal notes and publications. It is amongst these documents that one stumbles across published images and fragments of writing about what he characterised as “Native photography,” which entailed in his own words “recording as artistically as possible the
whole Native way of life and ranges from portraits and village scenes to pictures depicting their economic and material culture” (Denfield 1954). Moreover, he insisted that “[t]here is only one place to photograph the native and that is in his own territory, the Native reserve” (ibid.).
