(Un(scene) from the
Cedric Nunn Archive. Cedric Nunn, Wentworth Township. Durban. 1986. Pic supplied)
Art For Humanity presents an exhibition which showcases iconic documentary photography by Cedric Nunn and launches The African Documentary Photography Archive initiative.
Acclaimed documentary photographer Cedric Nunn unveils a new retrospective exhibition along with the launch of the African Documentary Photography archive (ADPAI), marking a pivotal moment in the preservation of South Africa's visual history.
The exhibition, curated by Ismail Farouk, invites viewers to explore Nunn’s photographs relationally, where moments in time and space forge connections between past and present, and across geographical expanse. The images serve as powerful tools for fostering solidarity with aspirations for social justice, portraying narratives of resilience, fugitivity and struggle that cut across barriers of race, class, gender, nation and beyond.
The ADPAI project aims to safeguard the vulnerable photographic negatives that form the backbone of Nunn’s archive, ensuring they are preserved for future generations. By digitising and cataloguing these negatives, the initiative seeks to make Nunn’s extensive body of work accessible to scholars, researchers, and the public alike.
The exhibition opening will take place at the DUT Satellite Gallery, offering attendees a collection of Nunn’s timeless photographs. Throughout the exhibition period, Art For Humanity will host a series of events, including artist talks, walks and workshops, providing deeper insights into the archival process, visual history in a South African context and conversations around photography, memory and the post-apartheid.
Cedric Nunn is an award-winning documentary photographer and artist based in Mangethe on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast. He began making photographs in 1982 and joined the Johannesburg-based photographic association and agency Afrapix in the same year. He was a longstanding member of Aprapix and continued to work with the agency until it closed in 1990.
As an independent documentary photographer and artist, his work has been showcased in galleries and museums in South Africa and abroad. In 2011, he won the first FNB Joburg Art Fair Award, and in 2016 the eThekwini Living Legends Award.
ADPAI is a project of Art for Humanity, hosted at the Faculty of Art and Design, Durban University of Technology (DUT). The project exists to meet the overwhelming need to digitise and make available the images of African documentary photographers, especially those who emerged in the 1980s and produced images of that all-important decade of transition in Southern Africa.
Many of these photographers were independent or worked in collectives and agencies which were independent. Their negatives (produced in analogue format in a pre-digital age, and a few prints) are largely not scanned and thus unavailable electronically, ensuring that these important images are not in national and global memory and consciousness.
The exhibition opens on July 27 at 11h00 and runs until August 23, 2024.
Walkabout Date: July 30 at 11h00.
Admission: Free and open to the public
The Satellite Gallery is situated in the Durban
University of Technology, City Campus, Corner of Anton Lembede and Julius
Nyerere, Durban.
For gallery information email: francescav@dut.ac.za