We normally associate this with journalists and publications from Europe and North America, but this time – surprise – it is a South African newspaper. This image is from the Johannesburg newspaper,  “The Star”, part of the Independent Group, a company that likes to advertise its liberal history. The wider climate in South Africa is one of xenophobia and racism against poor black people in the country’s inner cities, so no surprises. (Hat tip to Herman Wasserman to pointing it out to me.) By the looks of it, it is still okay to show photographs of black men in their underwear and with the implication that they are criminal. That they live in a single sex men’s hostel built under Apartheid for black migrant workers, may have a lot to do with it. Basically, they’re marginal.  No identification or context is required in the caption it seems.

This is in strong contrast to the legendary Ernest Cole’s work published in his book,”House of Bondage” (1967), images then taken surreptitiously in and around Johannesburg. Cole worked set out to document the dehumanizing effects of Apartheid.  One of those images is of naked, prospective migrant workers lined up in a cold room for a group examination. The image, below, has a different effect than that which appeared in The Star.  Cole took the photograph “… after sneaking his camera into the mine inside his lunch bag.”  The white authorities were embarrassed and banned the book immediately.

When Cole died of cancer in a New York hospital in February 1990 (only days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison), The New York Times summed up the impact of “House of Bondage” in a short obituary: “… For many Westerners, it was their first sight of what life was like for blacks in the South African mines, compounds and townships.”

In 2003, Juan Rodriquez wrote in PDN: “…By a bold maneuver, black photographer Ernest Cole  managed to obtain classification as “colored” by the South African authorities, allowing him to take jobs as a freelance photo-reporter and move relatively freely around the country For seven years he surreptitiously recorded the violent and degrading consequences of apartheid before fleeing to publish one of the great books of the century in New York.”