Matthew Blackman | Library Residency
Residency 17–31 March 2025
Process: Matthew Blackman | Library Residency, March 17–31, 2025. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title Matthew Blackman | Library Residency Dates 17–31 March 2025 Location Library

In January 2025, Matthew Blackman was in A4’s Library working on a personal research project on the history of South African modernism when he happened across our collection of photobooks documenting the country’s social landscape in the 1950s and 1960s. These books suggested a tributary he might follow: the influence and coincidence of art and jazz under apartheid, and the individuals that came to exemplify it, as reflected in Through My Lens: A Photographic Memoir by Alf Kumalo (2009), Jazz, Blues & Swing: Six Decades of Music (2007) by Jürgen Schadeburg, and Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage (1967), among others. Blackman returns to A4 to pursue this line of enquiry for our inaugural Library residency.

The re-publication of Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, with its restored final chapter, ‘Black Ingenuity’, has posited some questions. Many of the figures in the images have remained unidentified or misidentified. And yet traces and testimonies remain in hundreds of other images produced by his fellow Drum photographers. A great deal of work is required to synthesise these images and identities. As Lewis Nkosi observed in the 1960s, a nexus of creative urban social life in South Africa was at its climax, resulting in the production of some of the most pivotal works of South African art, writing, photography and music. At the centre of this creative moment was South African jazz and its growing culturally specific forms. Many of the photographers who worked for the magazines Zonk and Drum were swept up in the fecundity of this ‘fabulous decade’, as Nkosi termed it. They captured this fugitive creative movement that the apartheid regime attempted to destroy. Using Cole’s ‘Black Ingenuity’ as an activation point, this project will begin a longer research project into establishing the identities of these figures and their attendant creative practices.
– Matthew Blackman

–

The Library residency offers practitioners time and space to pursue their particular research queries and interests, working in and among our expansive collection of publications and miscellaneous printed matter. Residents have access to all our books and ephemera, the collaborative assistance of Daniel Malan in the role of librarian, and the support of the curatorial team over a two-week period. A4 is interested in sharing modes of research and investigation with our community, exploring ways of showing practitioners' process. We encourage residents to ‘think out loud’ via marginalia, recording their meanderings through books, essays, excerpts, and images, making the often opaque work of research visible. Towards the residency's end, practitioners are invited to develop a small programming component or engagement with the library's users and invited guests.

Reading Room constellation

Blackman selects artworks from A4’s Archive at the conclusion of his residency in the Library. Hung in the adjacent Reading Room, they supplement his research and provide prompts for further discussion.
Installation view: Matthew Blackman | Library Residency, March 17–31, 2025. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Harvest

"I learned about pacing – about the lapse of time – and rhythm in making a photobook through music."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The book allows me to go back in time. The way I interact with books is to go back and forth, navigating different ways through a story. It doesn’t need to be experienced as a linear narrative."
– Ashley Walters

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When I looked at Peter Magubane’s work, it was a starting point. I use my work to start conversations. Psychologically, fifty years later in Sharpeville, what has happened? I used his work as a point of reference. That’s what we do as a young different generation of photographers: we look at the generation before, and we take it forward."
– Jabulani Dhlamini

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"The photographs selected by the American publishers for the first edition [of Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage (1967)] are photojournalism, a documentation of the oppression that was happening in South Africa. That was a valid outlook on the country at the time, but what has been lost is the culture that developed."
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"This whole cultural movement was tied in with the [African National] Congress movement, which was deeply inclusive. It was a multi-racial, multi-ethnic movement that was happening. Apartheid went out to absolutely crush it. As a result, a huge amount was lost."
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"Many of these people went into exile – many of them died young while in exile – and with them their recollections. The impetus to the movement was deeply broken and, as a result, there is very little information out there other than Drum Magazine. There are aspects of this archive, but they're under-utilised."
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"There's a famous Peter Magubane photograph of a child singing and playing the piano with his piano teacher sitting behind him. The piano teacher turns out to be a very important woman – Emily Motsieloa – who was in the Merry Blackbirds and who composed a lot of the early South African jazz music of the 1930s and '40s. She's just sitting in the background, slightly out of focus, and everybody's concentrating on this cute little boy with his mouth open. It's a very appealing image, but there's a bigger story behind it… You learn so much by finding people and objects in the background."
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"The stories of urbanisation and modernity are fundamentally joined to one another. There was a new urban culture developing alongside continuous references to inherited culture."
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"The first image, which was – to me – instantly recognisable, is of Gideon Nxumalo, who majorly contributed to the orchestration of King Kong and some other musicals, and produced two very famous jazz albums [Jazz Fantasia (1962) and Gideon Plays (1968)]. But in the essay leading up to it, they just say something like, 'pianist/composer at piano'. This is an important figure – why aren't we identifying these people and identifying the culture that surrounded them, that they created?"
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"Maybe music allows for an easier transition. When you are creating images and writing about a place, it is quite alien for Europeans and Americans to understand what it is to be in South Africa. Ideas around apartheid are understood, but they're also untranslatable. They are very specific to place and time."
– Matthew Blackman

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"It’s also a reminder that writing (and maybe photography, though not as intensely) is, at its core, a solitary pursuit. When you're making music, you're in a band, making things happen with other people. You're constantly connecting to a sense of community."
– Khanya Mashabela

At the conclusion of the inaugural A4 Library Residency, Matthew Blackman, Khanya Mashabela, and Daniel Malan discuss South African jazz, art, and photojournalism in the 1950s and ‘60s.

"We were pretty naive in those days. We did our work and submitted it, left it to others who might have the gravitas and ‘smarties’ to frame our photographs. We didn’t have a great deal of agency, but then we didn’t resist this."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"When people talk about struggle photography, it’s a very specific vision or imagination they have of the past. Fists and flags. But at the same time, many of the photographers working at the time were also creating their own photographic projects, extending ourselves beyond the news moment as storytellers."
– Paul Weinberg

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

"Multi-sitedness in archaeology is useful because it means looking at multiple sites to understand a single site. Given our history, there is a strong emphasis on single sites – Sharpeville, Soweto – and reading history through single sites. Photobooks tend to ape this approach. It would be interesting to see a photobook on June 1976 that was multi-sited, and put it in dialogue with the photobooks that are hyper-focused on a single site."
– Rory Bester

Invited practitioners join Sean O'Toole for the official Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook marathon event, a two-day endurance exercise.

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