Anne Fischer: South African Photography and the Modernist Lens

Abstract

This dissertation examines the unheralded photographs that Anne Fischer (1914-1986), a German-Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in South Africa in the decade leading up to apartheid and in England following the Afrikaner Nationalists’ rise to power. Through close attention to her images and their circulation, I explore how this young woman mobilized German modernist aesthetics in her new colonial context and consider how her gendered experiences of migration and exile inflected the work she later made in post-war London. Focusing on the documentary work she produced between 1937 and 1950, this project examines four key episodes in Fischer’s unstudied career: the clandestine series of photographs she took in Langa, one of South Africa’s first racially segregated locations; the images she made in the rural areas of the Transkei and Ciskei during the Second World War; the propagandistic photobook she attempted to publish in the months leading up to South Africa’s pivotal 1948 elections; and the hundreds of street photographs she made in London where she lived for a brief period in a state of double exile. In addition to addressing the impetus that led to the production of these images, each chapter considers the aesthetic and political ramifications they had on the conservative publics in which they circulated and makes a case for the critically unrecognized importance of her work. As a young Jewish émigré, Fischer captured radical social transformations and contributed to South Africa’s early resistance movements with her lens. The first full-length study on her and her work, this project moves beyond simply filling a lacuna in the scholarship on women photographers in the field of African art history to demonstrate how South Africa’s artists, although historically sidelined in narratives of art, have made significant contributions to the development of documentary photography and the establishment of new transnational modernisms.