Available Light

“In this outstanding book, Daniel Magaziner provides a riveting portrait of Omar Badsha, one of South Africa’s great photographers and public historians, whose art and activism confronted racial oppression and forged nonracial realities. The book is a deep, sympathetic account of a complex, driven, and empathetic individual who was at the center of many of the major currents of South Africa’s resistance history. Available Light brings Magaziner’s formidable talents as a writer and historian to Badsha’s compelling life and powerful art.”

—Sean Jacobs, the New School, founder and publisher of Africa Is a Country

This biography of photographer Omar Badsha, who was intimately involved in documenting the struggle against apartheid, is also an intellectual history of protest in South Africa. Drawn from personal archives and interviews, the book conveys an intimate sense of Badsha’s work from the 1950s to today. Daniel Magaziner chronicles how art and politics became intertwined in South Africa and explains Badsha’s efforts to maintain a critical aesthetic approach to political crises. The book tracks the personal and social costs that such a commitment can incur, while also appreciating how Badsha and others like him have maintained their vision of an equitable, transformed society even today, when the ideals that once animated the South African struggle are on the back foot worldwide.