A review of Omar Badsha’s ‘Seedtime Retrospective’ at Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Better known as a social documentary photographer, anti-apartheid activist, unionist, historian, writer, many people do not know that Omar Badsha started his professional career as an artist in the 60’s. To introduce this my article on Badsha, I will quote Eric Newton, scholar, artist and art critic, from his book The Arts of Man. He wrote in the dawn of Badsha’s art career, ‘To note that man is a recorder of his own experience is important, for that is equivalent to saying that man is an artist.’

Omar Badsha, considered a pioneer of “resistance art”, is one of South Africa’s most celebrated documentary photographers. He has exhibited extensively at home and abroad and is our guest this week in our occasional Meqoqo (Conversations) slot. Iziko Museums is currently hosting a retrospective exhibition entitled Seedtime at the National Gallery in Cape Town. It showcases Badsha’s early drawings, artworks and photographic essays, spanning a period of 50 years. The epitome of the self-taught professional, he currently runs SA History Online (SAHO).

“I was terrified putting this thing up,” said photographer Omar Badsha one Saturday in early June. He was referring to the process of self-curating his astonishing career survey exhibition, Seedtime, on at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. “I wasn’t sure it would work.” Wearing a blue ball cap and sober business shirt, Badsha was addressing an audience gathered to listen a group of panelists make sense of his work, which spans five decades and includes woodcuts, pencil and crayon drawings and photographs. Based on their qualified feedback, his fears were unfounded.