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Tributes are paid to photographer Alf Kumalo

Tributes are paid to photographer Alf Kumalo

TRIBUTES have been paid to the photographer Alf Kumalo whose work chronicled the horrors of the apartheid era in his home country South Africa. He passed away aged 82.

Mr. Kumalo never received training in the field in which he was to become so highly respected across the world. 

He had started out as a reporter in the 1950s and part of the job involved having to take his own photographs. Never losing his reporter’s instinct, Mr. Kumalo turned from the written word to producing photographic images that never failed to capture the emotions and cruelty of what was happening around him.

The young journalist was to meet and photograph another young men who was to eventually play such a crucial role in bringing democracy to South Africa. At the time Nelson Mandela had been working as a lawyer.

Mr. Kumalo’s work was not without personal risk. He faced constant harassment from the security forces and was beaten and arrested on a number of occasions. But he never shied away from putting himself in the best position to get the shots he wanted.

Even when the authorities began to crack down on the taking of photographs at trouble-spots, Mr. Kumalo found ways to defy the orders — sometimes setting his camera on time-delay exposure so that the police believed he was not recording what was happening.

He was on hand to photograph some of the worst moments in the country’s modern history — the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 when 69 people were shot by police; the 1964 trial which resulted in Nelson Mendela being jailed for 20 years and the Soweto Uprising in 1976.

But his work was also to record the end of apartheid and the dawning of democracy with Nelson Mandela being released from jail to become the country’s first black President.

Following his death, the ruling African National Congress Party led tributes to Mr. Kumalo. In a statement the ANC said: “South Africa has lost a self-taught giant in the media field who still bore the scars of torture and mental scars of continuous detentions by the apartheid security forces.”

To view an excerpt from an interview in which Alf Kumalo discussed his work, click here.

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