Writing Art History Since 2002

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The International Centre for Photography in New York will host an exhibition entitled the Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life and includes work by photoraphers Jodi Bieber, David Goldblatt and Thabiso Sekgala.

Unidentified Photographer, Part of the crowd near the Drill Hall on the opening day of the Treason Trial, December 19, 1956. Times Media Collection, Museum Africa, Johannesburg.

This photographic exhibition examines the legacy of the apartheid system and how it penetrated even the most mundane aspects of social existence in South Africa, from housing, public amenities, and transportation to education, tourism, religion, and businesses. Complex, vivid, evocative, and dramatic, it includes nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines, newspapers, and assorted archival documents and covers more than 60 years of powerful photographic and visual production that forms part of the historical record of South Africa. Several photographic strategies, from documentary to reportage, social documentary to the photo essay, were each adopted to examine the effects and after-effects of apartheid’s political, social, economic, and cultural legacy. Curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, the exhibition proposes a complex understanding of photography and the aesthetic power of the documentary form and honors the exceptional achievement of South African photographers.

14 September 2012 to 16 January 2013

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