Southern Africa, 1936-1949: Photographs by Constance Stuart Larrabee
The daughter of a Scottish mining engineer and his British wife, Larrabee grew up in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. In 1933 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Photography in London and later worked as an apprentice to portrait photographer Madame Yevonde. She moved to Munich two years after that to pursue her studies at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, where she encountered the Bauhaus tradition. In 1936 Larrabee returned to Pretoria to open a portrait studio. Widely recognized a few years later as one of the top photographers and photojournalists in southern Africa, she was the first accredited woman photographer war correspondent; throughout World War II she covered action in Egypt, Italy, and France for the South African journal Libertas. After the war, she emigrated to the United States, married, and lived in Chestertown, Maryland, where she continued to photograph until her death.
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Where her technique and a particular moment in history truly come together is in three photographs of Johannesburg from 1948. In Street Photographer and Jeppe Street, South Africa might be the south side of Chicago: we see an urban black population going about its business in a well-established community. A man seated on a trash can is uncannily familiar, linking Jeppe Street and South Halsted. After these come some of Larrabee’s final images: the shantytowns and apartheid townships, steel buildings, dirt roads, houses made from discarded containers stacked atop one another.
