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Constance Stuart, photographer--a mere 21 years old--set up a studio in an elegant shopping arcade in downtown Pretoria, the capital of the then Union of South Africa. She soon gained fame as a portraitist. A free-spirited and inquisitive young woman, she also developed an interest in depicting the African peoples. Her own words best capture her motivation for photographing Africans: "I was young and enthusiastic. It was for the love of photography, the people, and the land, with no commercial or scientific purpose in mind. It was for the sheer delight of it" (1985). Her photographs reflect this love for the people and show her empathy and warmth. She portrays fellow human beings in their routine and extraordinary activities, not as ethnographic specimen or exotic actors staged by the photographer for the pleasure of distant onlookers. Stuart's initial photographic trips, often with like-minded friends, took her to the Ndebele peoples who live near Pretoria in Eastern Transvaal (now the Mpumalanga Province). Their colorful geometric wall designs and exquisite beadwork captivated the photographer's imagination. Stuart deliberately worked in black and white, even though color film was available in the 1940s. Her images translate the Ndebele aesthetic--brilliant colors and bold shapes--into her own, more restrained form of expression. Because color had been muted, her black-and-white photographs accentuated the striking geometric forms and shapes of Ndebele design. In the years to come, Stuart created an impressive body of work about other peoples in the Union of South Africa and the neighboring British protectorates of Basutoland (now Lesotho), Swaziland and Bechuanaland (now Botswana). While she emphasized portraiture, she also captured domestic activities, rituals, such as initiation, and ceremonies. Stuart's portraits often rendered the subjects in extreme close-ups and from unusual angles. Her attentiveness to human expression and her ability to capture poignant moments permeate her imagery. Stuart's photographs are striking for their purity, sharp definition and contrasting light and shadow. Modernist photographers had abandoned the romanticism and sentimentality of their predecessors, the Pictorialists, who created soft, moody, emotionally charged images. Stuart carefully composed her photographs of people and their activities, architecture, and landscapes. She preferred to photograph with a Rolleiflex, a twin-lens reflex camera developed in Germany that allowed her to work unobtrusively. While holding the camera at chest level, she focused through a viewing mirror and framed the 2 1/4" x 2 1/4" square image. Stuart composed and took her photographs quickly, capturing the appropriate moment, the unusual, the unexpected. This technique and her modernist eye gave her images a directness and vibrancy that have survived the decades. The Constance Stuart Portrait Studio in Pretoria flourished and, in 1946, she opened a second studio in Johannesburg. Her photographs of the peoples in southern Africa--the Ndebele, Sotho, Lovedu, Zulu, San and the peoples of the Transkei, an African reserve (later Homeland)--became the focus of several exhibitions in South Africa. In 1941 Stuart began to publish her images in renowned magazines and journals, such as Libertas, a periodical in South Africa. Although Constance Stuart Larrabee considers herself a photographer not a photojournalist, the nature of her work lent itself well to photojournalism. She even began writing essays to accompany the photographs she sent magazines. |