The form of the norm: shades of gender in South African photography of the 1980s Patricia Hayes* History Department, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa This essay deals with questions of form and content in the medium of photogra- phy in South Africa in the 1980s. The avowed purpose of progressive photogra- phers was a more complex portrayal of society than the images projected by the apartheid state. It is now routinely argued that particular norms emerged in the ensuing representation of socio-economic conditions and political resistance, and that these marginalised or elided women and broader questions of gender. I believe that while there are problems of gender that need examination, the cri- tiques of what is now glossed as ‘documentary photography’ are frequently reductionist because they are made with little or no scrutiny of the actual work in question. This has impelled me to re-examine selected works and their produc- tion from this period. Researchers with the Visual History project at the University of the Western Cape interviewed photographers grouped within and around the progressive collec- tive Afrapix, which operated between 1982 and 1992. 1 Our interview team asked questions about gender issues within Afrapix as an organisation, and within photog- raphy more broadly. This elicited an intriguing comment from Gille de Vlieg (2003): ‘I think one of the things that occurred to me along the way was that there was a hierarchy, and it was a South African hierarchy...’. De Vlieg goes on to describe a pyramid with white middle-class men at the top, white women and col- oured men in the middle and black men at the bottom. That it only occurred to her ‘along the way’ suggests a hierarchy that was not always obvious in the midst of political mobilisation, with features that only became defined over time. Thus, it is important actually to periodise the emergence and development of different bodies of work in relation to historical shifts around them. Between the Soweto uprising of 1976 and the start of the present century, there are three phases in South African photography where the inter-relationships between images, audiences and distribution are quite distinctive. This is not to insist that when a new phase began the previous one disappeared – on the contrary, continu- ities are apparent. But the phases coincide strongly with new economies in what Ingrid Masondo (2007) has called the ‘market of photography’. The first phase can be seen prior to the rise of international interest in the anti- apartheid struggle in the mid-1980s. This is a rich, painstaking phase during which *Email: pmhayes@mweb.co.za Social Dynamics Vol. 37, No. 2, June 2011, 263–277 ISSN 0253-3952 print/ISSN 1940-7874 online Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2011.615180 http://www.tandfonline.com