ABSTRACT
Photographer Magubane was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He started his career in 1956 as a photographer in Vrededorp, now Pageview, a suburb in Johannesburg on the magazine Drum and was a staff member of the Rand Daily Mail, a Johannesburg newspaper. For more than twenty years, he was the only major Black South African news photographer. His experiences, recorded in Magubane’s South Africa, portray his arrests, banning orders, solitary confinement, and other experiences under the apartheid system. He became more attracted to photography after using a Brownie as a schoolboy. Magubane’s photographs have documented the struggle for liberation in South Africa for more than fifty years. As a visiting scholar at UCLA, Magubane was honored at a reception at the newly renovated African-American Museum in Exposition Park. The reception was cosponsored by the Museum, the UCLA Center for American-American Studies, the Black Photographers of California, and the UCLA Center for African Studies. More than one hundred people attended the invitation-only event.
