Woman standing with magazine,

May 25, 1974

Z. J. S. Ndimande & Son’s studio was originally located on the corner of Bell Street and York Street in Greytown, Natal (present-day Kwa-Zulu Natal), South Africa, attached to the family’s hairdressing business. Ndimande was forced to move his studio in 1968, to Enhlalakahle, a township designated for Black people under the aegis of the Group Areas Acts. Studios like Ndimande & Son offered an alternative space for glorious self-making beyond the policing of everyday life: a location in which people could play with how they wanted to be seen, dressed in their Sunday best or in “traditional” Zulu clothing and beads—each accessory indicating layers of thoughtful amalgamation and speaking to trade routes and encounters with modernit(ies). Studio portraits became a way to interact with history, and to challenge the ways in which ethnographic photographs and passbook identity portraits tried to shape Black identity in South Africa: as fixed, flat, and stultified.

M. Neelika Jayawardane, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York, Oswego