People apart: 1950s Cape Town revisited

Based on a striking collection of photographs by Bryan Heseltine, which came to light as a result of my research. I am currently the only researcher working on this collection. The images were made in the late 1940s and early 1950s and provide a rich and intimate description of life in a number of townships and areas of the city: Windermere, the Bo-Kaap, District Six, Langa and Nyanga. Initial research and then publication supported by grants from Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art. The Pitt Rivers exhibition was accompanied by a 20 page catalogue [ISBN 978 0 902793 53 8]. In a six-month period the Pitt Rivers Museum attracts approximately 175,000 visitors. I have given public lectures on the project collection at the Photographer’s Gallery in London (April 2011), the Pitt Rivers Museum (November 2011) and District Six Museum, Cape Town (as part of the Human Rights Day programme, March 2011), and the project features as a slide show and interview on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-14150859. I have also given invited talks at the Victoria and Albert Museum conference, Figures and Fictions: The Ethics and Poetics of Photographic Depictions of People, which was held in conjunction with a major photography exhibition at the V&A, at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape as part of the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar Series, and at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University. As a result of the research, part of the negative collection has been donated to the permanent collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Further exhibition scheduled for Autumn 2013, District Six Museum, Cape Town.