Roadside trade, Chisamba, Zambia

In the same year, the Photographer’s Eye was an influential photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a collection of admired photographs curated by John Szarkowski, the museum’s director emeritus of the Department of Photography. A year earlier, in 1963, former Drum photographer Peter Magubane became the first black photographer in apartheid South Africa to exhibit his work, in Johannesburg, before being arrested and imprisoned for two years in 1969, and then banned from taking photographs for a further five years (Haney, 109). Drum is an important South African magazine that started in the 1950s, gathering professional African photographers and a readership of erudite Africans, often ANC members. Another ex-Drum photographer, Ernest Cole, eventually managed to publish House of Bondage (1967) in New York, which was the first published photographic account of apartheid in South Africa by a black South African. He died unhappily in exile in New York on the day of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison (111). ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia