TOM STONE sings the praises of one of the oldest open-air festivals in Britain
South Africa’s complex relationship with the camera
BOB NEWLAND recommends an outstanding study of how images have shaped narratives of identity, resistance and power in South Africa

Life Itself: Photography and South Africa
Simon A Clarke, Reaktion, £35
I’M NOT an artist or a photographer, but this book does not simply look at these skills. Rather, it explores the role of the art of photography in the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
As if to help non-experts like me, the book opens with a detailed and beautifully illustrated, easily understood, explanation of the development of the technology of photography in the context of the history of South Africa.
It then poses some challenging questions regarding the use of photography to present a picture of South Africa through colonial eyes.
Similar stories

SALEEM BADAT and VASU REDDY introduce a new book about an outstanding interpreter of the world, and an activist scholar committed to changing society

NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly

GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies

JOHN GREEN appreciates the clarity with which a GDR-born photographer observes the ‘post-competitive cannibalism’ of the contemporary US