For years, researchers have been searching for photographs made by Mabel Cetu, who “was said to be the first Black South African woman photojournalist” (Siopis 2006: 10). Cetu was a Black woman who worked as a nurse for more than twenty-five years before she was trained as a photographer in 1956, eight years after the National Party took over South Africa's government and introduced apartheid—a system of institutionalized racial discrimination against people of color. She received her training at the monthly publication Zonk! African People's Pictorial, which was launched in 1949 as the country's first widely circulated magazine directed at a Black readership (Maingard 2020: 153). Perhaps because many magazines published their images uncredited at the time, it seems as if none of her images have been found, meaning that they have never been discussed in scholarly research.1 Critically examining Cetu's photographs printed in...

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