Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life
Citation
Enwezor, Okwui, and Rory Bester, eds. Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life. New York / Munich: International Center of Photography / DelMonico Books / Prestel, 2013. 544 pp. ISBN 978-3-7913-5280-0.
Contributors: Rory Bester, Okwui Enwezor, Michael Godby, Khwezi Gule, Patricia Hayes, Achille Mbembe, Darren Newbury, Andries Walter Oliphant, Colin Richards.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Center of Photography, New York, 14 September 2012 – 6 January 2013. Subsequently traveled to Haus der Kunst (Munich, February–May 2013), Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea Milano (July–September 2013), and Museum Africa (Johannesburg, February 2014 – April 2015).
Tier justification
Tier 2: scholarly exhibition catalog from a major research museum (ICP, New York) with named curatorial authors and peer-recognized essays. Editors Enwezor and Bester are leading scholars of South African photography and photographic criticism of the Global South. Contributors include Patricia Hayes (NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory, University of the Western Cape) and Darren Newbury (University of Brighton), the two leading Anglophone scholars of South African documentary photography and USIA-era photographic diplomacy in Africa.
Relevance
The most substantial single scholarly volume on South African apartheid-era photography, covering the full period 1948–1994 across nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines, and archival documents. Patricia Hayes’s contribution makes this the strongest post-1994 scholarly anchor for understanding how documentary photography operated inside apartheid — the same framework within which The Family of Man’s Johannesburg showing (30 August – 13 September 1958) must be historicized.
No article in this catalog is confirmed to address The Family of Man directly. The ICP exhibition page (WebFetched 2026-04-30) makes no mention of Steichen’s exhibition; the catalog’s direct connection to The Family of Man is indirect — via the overlapping period, the overlapping photographers (Peter Magubane, Alf Kumalo are among those documented), and the overlapping question of humanist-universalist visual language under apartheid. This entry exists to enable future researchers to check whether Hayes, Newbury, or Godby’s essays contain FoM-specific discussion.
Key excerpts / pages
- ICP exhibition description (WebFetched 2026-04-30 from https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/rise-and-fall-of-apartheid): “The exhibition examines apartheid’s penetration into everyday life across multiple domains… featuring ‘nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines, newspapers, and assorted archival documents’ spanning over 60 years.” No mention of The Family of Man or Steichen in the fetched page.
- Contributor list confirmed by multiple WebSearch results citing Amazon.com and AbeBooks listings (2026-04-30): Godby, Gule, Hayes, Mbembe, Newbury, Oliphant, Richards.
- Publication year: search results return both 2012 (ICP exhibition year, used on some AbeBooks listings) and 2013 (Prestel imprint date on the publisher’s and Amazon’s listings). The Prestel record gives 2013; this entry uses 2013 as the publication year.
Notes
- Full text NOT consulted this round. No page-specific quotations recorded.
- The connection to The Family of Man is inferential, not directly attested. Do NOT use this entry as evidence that the catalog discusses FoM unless a future session fetches the relevant essay text. The value of the entry is as a pointer to the highest-quality scholarly literature on South African photography from the FoM period, by the scholars best positioned to have addressed the intersection.
- Darren Newbury is a contributor here and also the author of two additional sources entered in this round:
src-newbury-2024-cold-war-photographic-diplomacy(Penn State UP, 2024) andsrc-newbury-2024-african-looks-at-america(History of Photography, 2024). His scholarship forms the most systematic body of work on USIA visual diplomacy in Africa. - Patricia Hayes’s contribution to this catalog is consistent with her institutional profile as NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory at the University of the Western Cape — confirmed by WebSearch results returning her UWC research profile (2026-04-30). Her key publications listed in those results include contributions to Enwezor’s apartheid catalog, Mofokeng’s Chasing Shadows, and Crais and McLendon’s The South African Reader.
- Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen 1995 is the anchor for North American scholarly reception of FoM; this catalog is the parallel anchor for South African scholarly reception of the photographic tradition in which FoM was embedded. verified: false: Catalog confirmed to exist; contributor list confirmed via multiple bibliographic sources; content not directly fetched.