Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Jürgen Schadeberg, Whose Photos Chronicled Apartheid, Dies at 89

He gained rare entree into segregated Black communities and took pictures that bookended the career of Nelson Mandela.

Jürgen Schadeberg with one of the best known of his many photographs of Nelson Mandela at an exhibition in London in 2008.“When I arrived in South Africa in 1950,’’ he said, “I found two societies which were developing in parallel without any communication between them.”Credit...Katie Collins/Press Association, via Getty Images

Jürgen Schadeberg, a German-born photographer who survived the turmoil of wartime Berlin and then emigrated to South Africa, creating some of the most potent and enduring images of Nelson Mandela and chronicling the increasingly violent imposition of apartheid on Black lives, died on Saturday at his home in La Drova, Spain. He was 89.

His wife, Claudia Schadeberg, said the cause was stroke-related issues.

Unusually for a young white person, Mr. Schadeberg gained entree into segregated Black communities and photographed such emblems of talent in the face of adversity as the singer Miriam Makeba and the trumpeter Hugh Masekela.

His work broke with conventional photography in white South Africa. In a memoir published in 2017, he recalled being dismissed out of hand by a white photo editor in the early 1950s because he worked with compact 35-millimeter Leica cameras rather than with the larger-format Speed Graphics that prevailed in the white-run press — and in many parts of the world — as the news camera par excellence.

Even more significant, his subject matter went against the grain. A photo report on the harsh conditions and health risks confronting Black workers in an asbestos mine, he said in 2014, was turned down because, he was told, “They are only blacks.”

That rejection led him toward Drum, a monthly magazine aimed at a Black audience that sought to lure readers with investigative reporting and sometimes racy photographs as well as opinion columns, original fiction and sensational crime stories often relating to gang warfare in the townships.

Image
In the 1950s, Mr. Schadeberg photographed seminal events in the fight against apartheid, including the organized civil disobedience across South Africa known as the Defiance Campaign.Credit...Jurgen Schadeberg

“When I arrived in South Africa in 1950, I found two societies which were developing in parallel without any communication between them,” Mr. Schadeberg said in remarks accompanying “Jürgen Schadeberg — Photographies,” a collection of images published in France in 2006. “There was an invisible wall between these two worlds.”

“The Black world was becoming more and more dynamic on the cultural and political front,” he continued, “while the white world seemed isolated, stuck in its ways, so colonial and totally ignorant of the life of the blacks.”

As a newly arrived foreigner, he said, “I could easily move from one world to another.”

At Drum, which had become known as a mouthpiece of resistance, Mr. Schadeberg became the lead photographer and artistic editor. He was widely credited with mentoring young Black photographers who could not afford their own cameras and were denied access to jobs in the white-run media.

The magazine specialized in producing stories and photographs illustrating turning points in South Africa’s modern history, including the forced removal, from 1955 to 1959, of Black people from the racially mixed suburb Sophiatown, which was home to what Mr. Schadeberg called an “effervescent Black society” of jazz musicians, dance halls and bars.

Image
Mr. Schadeberg photographed the singer Miriam Makeba in 1955 for the cover of Drum magazine, one of the few outlets in apartheid-era South Africa to cover Black culture.Credit...Jürgen Schadeberg

His work at Drum in the 1950s coincided with seminal events including organized civil disobedience across South Africa, known as the Defiance Campaign, and the five-year treason trial of Mr. Mandela and 155 other foes of apartheid.

Drum “was like a family,” Mr. Schadeberg told The New York Times in 2014. “There was no discrimination inside the offices. It was only when you were outside of the front door that you knew you were in the land of apartheid.”

But in his memoir, “The Way I See it,” Mr. Schadeberg described a darker side to Drum: disputes between photographers over the provenance of widely seen images, freewheeling financial operations and a culture of alcohol abuse.

Image
Mr. Schadeberg gained entree into segregated Black communities and photographed emblems of talent in the face of adversity like the trumpeter Hugh Masekela.Credit...Jürgen Schadeberg

He left the magazine in 1959 after a personal dispute with Anthony Sampson, the editor, who later became a biographer of Mr. Mandela.

As a freelancer, Mr. Schadeberg continued to make striking photographs of events, like the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre of 69 Black protesters in March 1960. To photograph their funeral, he chartered a light airplane to circle the line of coffins to illustrate, he said, the scale of the killings. He left South Africa in 1964.

Among his most well remembered photographs were two that bookended Mr. Mandela’s career. The first, taken in 1952, showed Mr. Mandela in the law office in Johannesburg that he shared with Oliver Tambo, a fellow leading figure in their party of resistance, the African National Congress. The second, from 1994, showed Mr. Mandela revisiting the prison cell on Robben Island, off Cape Town, where he had spent much of his 27-year incarceration.

Like the work of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who sought to capture what he termed “the decisive moment,” Mr. Schadeberg’s photographs displayed a sense of composition and meaning that achieved a greater significance.

“A photograph is a pause button on life,” he said in 2017. “You capture a moment in life, a moment that has gone forever and is impossible to reproduce.”

Image
Mr. Schadeberg photographed Mr. Mandela in 1952 in the law office he shared with Oliver Tambo in Johannesburg.Credit...Jürgen Schadeberg

Jürgen Schadeberg was born in Berlin on March 18, 1931, and was raised by his mother, Rosemarie, as the only child in a single-parent family of limited means. In his memoir, he depicted his mother as a bit-part stage and film actor. He did not identify his father by name.

His mother, he said, falsified her age on her birth certificate to make herself seem 10 years younger and sometimes introduced him as her younger brother.

Mr. Schadeberg called the years of World War II in Berlin a “slow descent into hell.” One of his first photographs was of people grouped around an accordion player in an air raid shelter in 1942. In his memoir, he described ruses to avoid meetings of a Nazi youth movement and the ever more pervasive imposition of Nazism on Berliners, including the persecution of the city’s Jews.

When British forces entered the city, Mr. Schadeberg wrote, a British officer came to his mother’s apartment by chance. His name was Capt. Oswald Hammond, and the encounter led to a relationship with his mother and marriage.

The couple emigrated to South Africa in 1947, leaving Mr. Schadeberg to study photography and to work as a darkroom assistant and photographer at the German Press Agency in Hamburg until he, too, emigrated to South Africa, in 1949.

Image
Mr. Schadeberg called the years of World War II in Berlin a “slow descent into hell.” One of his first photographs was of people grouped around an accordion player in an air raid shelter in 1942.Credit...Jürgen Schadeberg

Mr. Schadeberg’s first encounters with apartheid were shocking and bewildering. “I was continually fascinated by how isolated people in South Africa were from the rest of the world,” he wrote.

Working for a company called Werner’s Studio, he traveled around the country taking formal portraits, mainly of white clients. He found that many Afrikaners, learning that he was German, told him that they wished Hitler had won the war.

After he joined Drum in 1951, he met a South African actor called Etricia, whom he married. They had four children before divorcing in the early 1960s.

He had a brief second marriage to a Portuguese woman, whom he did not identify by name in his memoir. He married Claudia Horvath, an art historian and television producer, in 1984.

Besides his wife, Mr. Schadeberg’s survivors include their son, Charlie; his children from previous relationships, Wolfgang, Martine, Frankie, Bonnie and Leon; 15 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Image
In 1994, Mr. Schadeberg photographed Mr. Mandela revisiting the prison cell on Robben Island, off Cape Town, where he had spent much of his 27-year incarceration.Credit...Jürgen Schadeberg

From 1964 onward, Mr. Schadeberg worked in Britain, Spain, Africa, the United States, Germany and France before returning to live in South Africa in 1985. His most striking images from that period include photographs showing the demolition of slums known as the Gorbals in Glasgow.

In 1973 he embarked on a 7,000-mile hitchhiking trip through several African states, from west to east, to chronicle the lives of ordinary people. He also taught photography in Britain, the United States and Germany. From 1961 to 1981, he documented the Cold War division of his native Berlin.

In 1985, back in South Africa, Mr. Schadeberg embarked on a yearlong project to catalog the Drum archives, which he had found three years earlier on a farm owned by the magazine’s former owner, Jim Bailey. The archive later inspired lasting feuds over copyright and royalty payments.

During this period, as Mr. Schadeberg and his wife focused on producing books based on the Drum archive and documentaries, South Africa was changing dramatically. Protesters on the streets of segregated Black townships clamored for change and for the freedom of Mr. Mandela, which finally came in 1990.

Image
Mr. Schadeberg, left, with Mr. Mandela and the South African photographer Alf Kumalo at an exhibition of their photographs to celebrate Mr. Mandela’s 88th birthday in 2006.Credit...Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In 1994, citing their belief in the so-called rainbow nation of a new South Africa, Mr. Schadeberg and his wife took South African citizenship. They left again in 2007, living first in northern France, then Berlin, then Spain. But they had witnessed possibly the most remarkable transformation of all when South Africa held its first fully free elections in 1994.

“It was a tremendously happy, positive atmosphere,” Mr. Schadeberg said in 2014. “People were standing in the hot sun for sometimes all day to vote, and there was a missis and her maid standing next to each other and for the first time talking to each other like normal human beings.”

After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.

  More about Alan Cowell

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Jürgen Schadeberg, Photographer Of the Arc of Apartheid, Dies at 89. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT