Apartheid’s Ghosts; The faces

Black and White Photography by Enid Holden

A show of portraits of black South Africans, taken in the 1980′s, during Apartheid and never before shown. The faces represent a generation that responded to the political strictures of the day with courage, despair and defiance. This is the generation that witnessed the end of Apartheid in 1994, when Nelson Mandela and the ANC was voted into power.

It was in the midst of Apartheid, in 1986 on the east coast of South Africa, that I photographed the people in this showy. These photographs are unusual for that time, as the black population of South Africa was so limited in where they could work and what they could earn in the 1980’s that cameras were not common among them. The white press was very often simply not interested in stories pertaining to people of color, and so not many photographic portraits of everyday people exist from that time. Certainly, the white and black citizens of South Africa were so much divided by laws that enforced separate education and living areas, that few whites who owned cameras had much opportunity to photograph members of other races.

I wanted to record the people around me at that time, and in so doing, make others aware of their social conditions. I think each face has a powerful story to tell.