From the publisher:

Photography and video are powerful tools for shaping perception and effecting change, as is convincingly portrayed through the images in this catalogue. Featuring the works of sixteen South African photographers and video artists from 1950 to the present, the catalogue was conceived to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The cultural and political turbulence of South Africa has lent particular urgency to the role of these media. The eight sections of this catalogue explore a broad spectrum of social and aesthetic themes that have not been brought together in this way before in the United States or abroad.

Darkroom focuses on four generations of artists, including those who lived and worked primarily in South Africa during the apartheid era (1948-1994) and a younger generation that has gained wide international prominence since apartheid’s end. The title refers to both literal and metaphorical dark rooms: the actual place where photography and video is made or seen; the artistic isolation created by apartheid; and the psychological and physical hardship of making meaningful work under threat of imprisonment, torture, and exile.

The images appear as they are organized in the galleries: eighty-six photographs, eight photo-based installations, and six video installations. The artists include native South Africans and long-term South African residents from Germany, the United States, and England.

Contributing Artists
Roger Ballen * Ian Berry * David Goldblatt * William Kentridge * Peter Magubane * Thando Mama * Senzeni Marasela * Santu Mofokeng * Zweiethu Mthethwa * Robin Rhode * Tracey Rose * Jürgen Schadeberg * Berni Searle * Andrew Tshabangu * Nontsikeleio Veleko * Sue Williamson

Distributed for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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Tosha Grantham is the Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. She was the curated the exhibit on which this catalogue is based. Deborah Willis is an art photographer as well as a leading historian of African American photography and a curator of African American culture. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a past recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. Isolde Brielmaier is a Professor of Art at Vassar College and the founding director of the Brooklyn Institute of Contemporary Art. Tumelo Mosaka, originally from South Africa, is Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Zwelethu Mthethwa. Edited by Isolde Brielmaier, essay by Okwui Enwezor, Spring 2010, 113/4 x 10 in. (29.8 x 25.4 cm), 180 pages, 75 four-color images, Hardcover with jacket
ISBN 978-1-59711-113-3, $65.00; £45.00

Also available
A slipcased limited edition with print.
Please contact Aperture for information.

From the publisher:

Since Apartheid’s fall in 1994, South African photography has exploded from the grip of censorship onto the world stage. A key figure in this movement is Zwelethu Mthethwa, whose stunning portraits powerfully frame black South Africans as dignified and defiant, even under the duress of social and economic hardship. Working in urban and rural industrial landscapes, Mthethwa documents a range of aspects in South Africa—from domestic life and the environment to landscape and labor issues. His work challenges the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography, marking a transition away from the visually exotic and diseased—or “Afro-pessimism,” as curator Okwui Enwezor has referred to it—and employing a fresh approach marked by color and collaboration. Zwelethu Mthethwa is the artist’s long-awaited first comprehensive monograph, providing an overview of his work to-date and featuring the stunning portraits that have brought him international acclaim.
ZWELETHU MTHETHWA (born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 1960) received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, a then white’s only university he entered under special ministerial consent. He received his master’s degree while on a Fulbright Scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mthethwa has had over thirty-five international solo exhibitions and has been featured in numerous group shows, including the 2005 Venice Biennial and Snap Judgments at the International Center of Photography, New York. Mthethwa is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

ISOLDE BRIELMAIER (editor) is visiting assistant professor of art at Vassar College, and guest professor at Barnard College/Columbia University as well as an independent curator and writer. OKWUI ENWEZOR (essay) is dean of academic affairs at San Francisco Art Institute, and the former artistic director of both Documenta XI and the second Johannesburg Biennale. He is a pioneering critic and curator.