Listening and reading: Leon Levson’s ‘native studies’ photographs in the anti-apartheid Mayibuye archives

Abstract

The thesis focuses on Leon Levson’s ‘native study’ photographs, taken in the 1940s in the rural areas of Transkei and Bechuanaland. These photographs are housed at the UWC-Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Archives as part of the International Defence Aid Fund (IDAF) photography collection. I am interested in the archival glitch of the ‘native study’ as located at an anti-apartheid archive and how Leon Levson has been situated at the centre of the South African social documentary photography tradition in this archive. Levson’s desire was to produce a pictorial testimony of ‘natives’.