In its presentation of private images from two very different family photo collections, this unusual book highlights the small details—the commonplaces— of everyday life often forgotten in the larger narrative of South African history.
The Ngilima collection is the combined work of Ronald Ngilima and his son Thorence, ambulant black photographers who photographed life in the African, Coloured and Indian neighbourhoods around Benoni, east of Johannesburg, in the 1950s. The Drummond-Fyvie collection belongs to a white, English-speaking farming family from Estcourt in KwaZulu-Natal, covering 150 years of the family’s history.