Images
of Childhood in South Africa
Ten Years After Apartheid
BY ALEX FATTAL (LEWIS HINE FELLOW, 2002–2003)
INTRODUCTION BY ALEX FATTAL
As a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow I was assigned to work with the
Children’s
Rights Centre (CRC) in Durban, South Africa, as a documentary
researcher. The CRC, initially a peace-building organization during
the violence in Kwa Zulu-Natal in the 1980s and early 1990s, has
grown into a national non-governmental organization mobilizing and
advocating for children’s rights in every sector of South
African society. My assignment was to explore challenges to children’s
rights in a qualitative, visual, and participatory way. For eighteen
months, from February 2003 until August 2004, I traveled from one
household to another, staying with my gracious hosts for three weeks
at a time. During these brief but intense encounters I forged relationships
and carried out small collaborative documentary projects with the
children and their parents or caregivers. They would photograph
in black and white, I would photograph in color, and various family
members would then tell stories about the images. The narrative
exercise allowed the family to reflect on their lives and communities
by analyzing the content of the pictures as well as their motives
for making the images.
My colleagues at the CRC were excited by how the images and stories
illustrated and animated their policy and advocacy work, and they
helped me synthesize these vastly diverse collaborative documentary
projects into one exhibition, Children’s
Visions & Voices: Rights & Realities in South Africa.
As the exhibition tours South Africa—from a health and population
research institute in rural Kwa Zulu-Natal to the Constitutional
Court in Johannesburg, from the Durban Art Gallery to a venue in
downtown Cape Town, among others—it continues to be an extremely
useful tool for the CRC to stimulate discussion about, and advocate
for, children’s rights in South Africa.
One year after putting the exhibition together for the CRC, I returned
to the United States and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke
University to work with the photographs from the project and re-explore
what these images had to say about childhood in contemporary South
Africa. Looking back through the images, I felt as though I was
meeting all these extraordinary individuals and families again,
and perhaps seeing them in a new way. I see moments that are more
familiar than foreign, more personal than anything else. I’m
convinced that the world is more complicated than anything we can
say about it—and if this is true, perhaps these pictures can
reach beyond the constraints of issues or politics to speak to our
common humanity.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX FATTAL
INTRODUCTION
TO PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDREN AND THEIR CAREGIVERS
As a documentary researcher for the Children’s Rights Centre,
I approached the daunting task of representing issues surrounding
children’s rights by organizing the projects so viewers would
see multiple perspectives—my own, as well those of the family
and community members I came to know and collaborate with over the
course of the project. I particularly wanted the children to present
their understanding of their lives, rather than impose my own interpretation
on them. I also wanted the parents and caregivers, who face difficult
choices regarding their children, to offer perspectives on these
realities as opposed to promoting the opinions of experts on children’s
issues and rights.
I began each project by working with the children first, leading
a series of discussions about taking photographs in their everyday
environments, and then teaching them the basics of framing, lighting,
and operating a camera. Then they, in turn, would teach their parents
(when their parents agreed to take part). The children were free
to let their natural enthusiasms drive their picture-making—the
only themes were “past,” “present,” and
“future.”
I stayed with these families—sleeping on floors and couches,
going to work or school with them, and helping with household chores—but
much of their everyday lives is absent from the images I made. I
knew this to be true, but never more so than when I sat with the
children and their caregivers to discuss their contact sheets. For
example, I would never have thought to photograph the top of a tall
building in Johannesburg, because I have never felt so deeply the
menacing insecurity of the streets they overlook. For Marlene, the
skyscraper represented the precarious loneliness of fleeing from
a drunken home to a seething city—two environments that did
not provide for her needs.
This small selection of images and words by South African children
and their caregivers is an invitation to consider what lies beyond
an outsider’s gaze, even beyond visual perception—the
emotion below the emulsion.
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDREN AND THEIR CAREGIVERS
