PHOTOGRAPHY: Uncanny similarities and stark differences
Commonplace, a new book of photographs published by independent publishers Fourthwall Books, shows two personal collections of images of 20th century SA as it is seldom seen
These startling juxtapositions appear in a new book, Commonplace, a collaboration between Sophie Feyder and Tamsyn Adams, published by independent publishers Fourthwall Books (with the help of L’Oeuvre Nationale de Secours Grande-Duchesse Charlotte and CNA). The similarity between the photographs is almost uncanny. The women’s poses are identical: a sort of sideways reclining pin-up pose, with their upper bodies resting on one elbow and a coy kink in one knee. The difference is that one is a white woman in a bathing suit on the beach at Scottburgh in the 1930s or 1940s, and the other is a black woman in a kind of undergarment arranged to look a bit like a bathing costume, on a bed in a room in an East Rand township in the mid-1950s. The images are from two vastly different private photographic collections. The Drummond-Fyvie Collection belongs to a white, English-speaking family who lived in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands, and spans 150 years. The other, the Ngilima Collection, is a col...
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