VULNERABILITIES OF THE IMAGE: Cedric Nunn & Coloured Family in Struggle

Cedric Nunn (b.1957-) is a South African anti-apartheid photographer and a long time biographic chronicler of identity. Classified as coloured, yet self-identifying as black, Nunn resisted the complicity that was inextricable from coloured classification during apartheid. He photographed his family over the course of thirty-years in the rural province of KwaZulu-Natal where he paid close attention to his maternal grandmother, Amy ‘Madhlawu’ Louw whose mere life in iVuna, Zululand transgressed apartheid laws of race. This paper argues that Nunn not only reframes family photography through his politics of resistance, but also re-frames the very image of coloured family during apartheid.