Invisible Communities and Their Visible Cameras: The Landscape Photography of the Chinese Camera Club of South Africa

The Chinese Camera Club of South Africa (CCCSA), sometimes known as the Chinese Camera Club of Johannesburg, was a group of Chinese South African photographers who were at their most active during the 1950s and 1960s. Despite their small numbers and the discrimination and exclusion they suffered as Chinese South Africans, this group of tenacious and dedicated photographers achieved success and recognition in photographic networks at home and abroad. I will concentrate on one aspect of their output—namely, landscape photography—to argue that individual members of the CCCSA used photography to visualize a sense of belonging to both China and South Africa.¹ By giving visual expression to multiple configurations of identity, which were simultaneously local and international, club members actively contested their treatment by the apartheid state. In particular, I consider how members of the club photographed the South African landscape in ways which drew on conventions associated with Chinese...