Life Itself: Photography and South Africa by Simon A. Clarke

ISBN: 9781836390428

Reaktion Books, April 2025

256 pages, Hardcover

From colonialism to democracy, Life Itself offers a comprehensive overview of South Africa’s photographic history. Featuring images from the heyday of Drum magazine and Black emergence to Peter Magubane’s Soweto uprising pictures, David Goldblatt’s In Boksburg to the photographers’ collective Afrapix and the struggles for freedom, this book concludes with post-apartheid documentary and art photography in the work of Andrew Tshabangu, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, and others. Life Itself helps to fill a gap in our understanding of the role of the camera in South African society