On Wednesday, an exhibition opened at the Gallery of Photography chronicling South African life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s. Guaranteed to move even the most apathetic viewer, Jurgen Schadeberg's work packs more punches than a lecture series could ever hope to. The South African ambassador, Pierre Dietrichsen, was delighted with the crowds thronging the Temple Bar venue: "Jurgen's photos really open up a page of history that many, including myself, have never seen."
The stark black-and-white images tell their own stories. In one, men hug a wall taking refuge as a Johannesburg police patrol passes by. In another, from 1960, we see the mass burial of 67 people killed in the Sharpeville massacre. Most were shot in the back.
Schadeberg urgen was the first staff photographer to be taken on at the journal, Drum, named after the African bush telegraph. A Berliner who lived through the war, the photographer felt compelled to travel: "I wanted to get out of Europe; by comparison with the rest of the world it seemed terribly boring."
Arriving in South Africa in 1950, he found so much to occupy him that he stayed for 14 years. While apartheid cracked down on the Communist Party and ANC, the more community-based Drum survived to chronicle the regime's more brutal excesses.