Slought is pleased to announce Caught Up in History, a talk by photographer and curator Paul Weinberg about the engaged camera in South Africa, on Wednesday, February 20, 2019 from 6-8pm. The turbulent period of repression by the apartheid government in the 1980's was matched with political resistance and cultural activism. The camera was deeply part of this wave. Individual photographers who had been working on their joined forces in what became known as the collective movement of photography, unparalleled in South Africa's history. Their work appeared on numerous fronts – through the mainstream when possible, the alternative press, in exhibitions, posters, and calendars.

Joyce Ozinski, writing for the cultural activist magazine, Staffrider, encapsulated the zeitgeist of the time. To take photographs in that climate she wrote was an act of defiance in itself, "To see what had not been hitherto been seen; to make visible what had been invisible; to find ways of articulating, through the medium of photography, a reality obscured by government propaganda and the mass media – this was the challenge to photographers.....Each image that appeared in Staffrider was a victory over these obstacles."

At the heart of the movement was an organisation called Afrapix, a photographic collective that could be described as a South African version of the Photo League and Magnum all rolled into one. It was the first non-racial collective of photographers and imbued the spirit of the anti -Apartheid movement that swept throughout the country and the world in this decade. Under the broad aegis of documentary photography, Its diversity was not only in its non- racial make-up but in style and approach. The photographers of this time are often referred to as 'struggle photographers'. But the term limits the broader understanding of the photographic movement, its relationship to the country and its history. Known amongst themselves as the 'Taking Sides' generation, Paul Weinberg, a founder member of Afrapix and integrally part of this collective movement will share and unpack his personal experiences of the time, with reflections on his own work and the movement as a whole.