Cedric Nunn Unscene Walkabout

Acclaimed documentary photographer Cedric Nunn unveils a new retrospective exhibition along with the launch of the African Documentary Photography archive (ADPAI), marking a pivotal moment in the preservation of South Africa’s visual history.

The exhibition, curated by Ismail Farouk, invites viewers to explore Nunn’s photographs relationally, where moments in time and space forge connections between past and present, and across geographical expanse. The images serve as powerful tools for fostering solidarity with aspirations for social justice, portraying narratives of resilience, fugitivity and struggle that cut across barriers of race, class, gender, nation and beyond.

The ADPAI project aims to safeguard the vulnerable photographic negatives that form the backbone of Nunn’s archive, ensuring they are preserved for future generations. By digitising and cataloguing these negatives, the initiative seeks to make Nunn’s extensive body of work accessible to scholars, researchers, and the public alike.

About Cedric Nunn: Cedric Nunn is an award-winning documentary photographer and artist based in Mangethe on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast. Nunn began making photographs in 1982 and joined the Johannesburg based photographic association and agency Afrapix in the same year. Nunn was a longstanding member of Aprapix and continued to work with the agency until it closed in 1990. As an independent documentary photographer and artist, his work has been showcased in galleries and museums in South Africa and abroad. In 2011, he won the first FNB Joburg Art Fair Award, and in 2016 the eThekwini Living Legends Award.

About ADPAI: ADPAI is a project of Art for Humanity, hosted at the Faculty of Art and Design, Durban University of Technology (DUT). The project exists to meet the overwhelming need to digitise and make available the images of African documentary photographers, especially those who emerged in the 1980s and produced images of that all-important decade of transition in Southern Africa. Many of these photographers were independent or worked in collectives and agencies which were independent. Their negatives (produced in analogue format in a pre-digital age, and a few prints) are largely not scanned and thus unavailable electronically, ensuring that these important images are not in national and global memory and consciousness.

Exhibition Details:

Venue: Satellite Gallery, Durban University of Technology, City Campus, Corner of Anton Lembede and Julius Nyerere, Durban

Opening: Saturday 27 July at 11:00am

Exhibition Duration: 27 – July to 23 August

Walkabout Date: 30 July at 11:00am

Admission: Free and open to the public

For gallery information email: francescav@dut.ac.za

Image Caption: Cedric Nunn, Wentworth Township. Durban. 1986. Copyright © 2024 Cedric Nunn, All rights reserved.