Left: Nelson Mandela's mother, Nosekeni, with grandchildren holding a picture of her son, 1962. Right: Robert Kennedy outside the Regina Mundi Catholic Church in Soweto, 1966. (Photos: Alfred Kumalo)

IN 2012, awash in images, it is hard to conceive of a time when a photograph of someone like Nelson Mandela could be a rarity. But in the last decades of South Africa’s apartheid, leaders like Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Robert Sobukwe were imprisoned, exiled, or killed. All images of them were banned. In this atmosphere, photographs of these men assumed a spectral, iconic status. Dog-eared and worn, stuffed into drawers and hidden among papers, the few portraits that existed of such figures circulated like contraband. Possessing these photographs could lead to trouble. And taking them certainly did. That’s why Alf Kumalo, unofficial portraitist to the Mandela family, played such a pivotal role in the anti-apartheid struggle. It was not only that he captured the human rights atrocities of the public realm, but also that he followed families home afterward, and in the quiet of a living room or the corner of a kitchen, he documented the private toll that imprisonments, forced separations, and banning orders took on families.

After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when Mandela was charged with founding Umkhonto we Sizwe and went underground, he effectively disappeared from public view. He also lost touch with family. Searching for news of her son (who was already imprisoned), Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni Fanny Mandela, traveled in 1962 up to Johannesburg, where Kumalo photographed her surrounded by her grandchildren. At the center of the image, in the vacuum created by Mandela’s absence, Nosekeni clutches her son’s photograph, while the children pass prints around. A young Zenani looks on, her father having withered into a piece of paper.

This is such an image of loss. Yet it is also Kumalo’s self-reflexive picturing of photographs and their work: a tale of their circulation in the hands of loved ones, and the story of the little squares that fought against the complete erasure of a person condemned to disappear for twenty-seven years.

Leora Maltz-Leca is assistant professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at Rhode Island School of Design.

Left: Nelson Mandela with Alf Kumalo. Photo © Nelson Mandela. Right: Alf Kumalo being arrested at a boxing match in Johannesburg in May 1976. Photo courtesy Alf Kumalo Foundation and Photographic Museum.

ALF AND I met a long time ago, perhaps in 1968 during Edward Kennedy’s tour of South Africa. After that we saw each other occasionally, sometimes not for a year or two, but whenever we did it was with a warmth for each other that we seemed to share. I suspect that that was how Alf related with many other people, for he had such an openness and generosity that it was natural and easy to be that way with him.

To my regret, he and I never discussed his thoughts about photography and his own work. But watching him on a number of occasions at work and seeing the outcome, in photographs of acute observation, it is clear that he was a passionately dedicated chronicler of history. He seemed to be aware of the passing of every moment and of its possible historic importance. There was an unquenchable need for him, Alf Kumalo, to put it on film. He was never without his camera; he used it frequently and did, indeed—in photographs of enduring substance and sensitivity—hold much of our history.

It is legendary that for many years Alf’s negatives rode with him in his car. Having held the moment, he seemed to have none of the collector’s greed for possession and for anything so pedantic as filing. When we invited Alf to have an exhibition at the photography gallery in the Market Theatre in the early 1980s, he was happy to leave the selection of work to me (which effectively meant that I had to rummage through hundreds of prints and thousands of negatives in the trunk of the car).

Alf has left us a vast and invaluable body of work. A fitting tribute to this remarkable photographer and gentle man would be its proper preservation in the Alf Kumalo Archive of Photography.

David Goldblatt is a photographer living in Johannesburg.

Franz West, 2009. Photo: Markus Rössle.

IN 1999, I curated an exhibition of the work of Mike Kelley and Franz West in Brussels. Catherine Bastide joined me in this adventure; it took place almost by chance, and was based solely on an intuition that those two bodies of work had something to say to each other, and together something to say to the times—which were then dominated by identity politics and relational aesthetics. I had worked with Mike before, but never with Franz. We all met in Franz’s home in Vienna. The idea was to record a conversation between us that would also lead to the exhibition. I was young, inexperienced, and extremely awed by these two. Mike was simultaneously reluctant and interested; Franz was on his guard. The conversation became the catalogue, as well as a theater play later presented at FRAC Angoulême with an amateur theater group. Franz simply asked the actors to yell the text at each other as fast and as loud as possible to a soundtrack by Peter Weibel’s proto-punk band, Hotel Morphila. Everyone made fun of us, and the result was aggressive and hilarious.

It was obvious that Mike and Franz admired each other’s work. It was also clear they would never have much to do with one another on a personal level. They never befriended. Mike’s analytical approach and hyperanxiety did not sit well with Franz’s constructed nonchalance and hedonism, with the pleasure he took in not saying much although it was clear he saw and understood it all. Indeed, Franz took great pleasure in gently torturing the agoraphobic Mike with long drives in the woods outside of Vienna, indulging in delicious meals and small conversations at long tables populated by his ever changing entourage.

In 2003, I invited Franz to participate in the Lyon Biennial. On that occasion, I hoped to combine his work with that of Bruno Gironcoli, who had been one of his most influential professors at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. We met at Gironcoli’s studio, a grotto-like warehouse from which the walls had to be torn down in order to accommodate transport for his gigantic sculptures. Gironcoli suffered from a severe brain tumor; he was himself an obese giant, an ogre who could not speak anything but German, and he was constantly drooling and falling asleep. But when Franz arrived to meet us, he was extremely respectful and gentle with Gironcoli, who obviously resented him for his success. It was, to say the least, a highly uncomfortable encounter, and yet it resulted in two wonderful rooms in the Biennial.

Franz had an intoxicating capacity to drift freely through everyday experience. He knew how to enjoy cars, antiques, food, gems, books, and he was always looking for people who could follow him while preserving the lightness of it all, a lightness that came to him at a very high price. He was seduction made man, a combination of acute insight, aristocratic detachment, dark humor, and talent. He could see through people, and he knew exactly what he could or could not do with you. And his intelligence sometimes led him to play with people as a puppet master. But really, how far he would go was always up to you.

While I was working on an exhibition in Toulouse, France, in 2011, nearly every day I passed one of Franz’s sculptures, installed in a public garden. There is almost no trace of the contemporary in Toulouse, and I noticed that the tall, organic pink metal structure was used as a meeting point for teenagers, and that people had their picture taken at its feet. I was told the city had been afraid of people’s reaction to the sculpture, anticipating rejection and degradation. In the end, it was clearly adopted as a sign of freedom and pleasure, creating its own playful and contemporary space.

I can only think of Franz as someone deep and brilliant and painfully clairvoyant, someone who decided to opt for life and to find joy, beauty, and humor in the lowest and the highest alike, reinventing sculpture while doing so.

Anne Pontégnie is co-director of Le Consortium in Dijon, France, and curator of the Cranford Collection in London.

Franz West at the 2007 Venice Biennale. (Photo: David Velasco)

WHEN FRANZ WEST received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, he delivered his speech with a typically Westian sense of mischief. After offering his sincere thanks, he noted that his mother had written his speech, but that, alas, he had forgotten it at the hotel. That West brought “mother” into play was hardly capricious. It can be interpreted metaphorically as a nod to his Freudian, Viennese background, but also, quite literally, as a reference to the way that his mother, a dentist with a practice on the legendary Karl Marx-Hof, inspired his art. His early, portable sculptures, the significant “Passstücke,” are prostheses of a kind, and pink (think dentures) emerges again and again as a favorite color in his work. With his references to the body as well as philosophy, psychology, and literature, West opened art to other discourses, thus releasing them from their traditional institutional confines. His sculptures, furniture—even the collages—arrived as players on a meta-stage, part of an elastic theater in which the exuberant growth of form, both palpable and intangible, is celebrated in all its joyful, liberating shabbiness.

West was the perfect fit to construct a “Parapavilion” for the fifty-fourth Venice Biennale, which I curated. The idea of the Parapavilion targeted the national pavilions, which constitute the biennial’s historical peculiarity. I asked five artists to design a structure that could house the art of other artists I had proposed, and he executed his with stunning bravura. West’s idea was to produce a copy, in Venice, of the kitchen in his Vienna studio. Inside the polygonal space he built, we installed a slide projection by Dayanita Singh. But the outer walls displayed hand-painted green-and-white wallpaper by Tamuna Sirbiladze, which were hung with, and served as a backdrop to, works by everyone from Elisabetta Benassi and Gelitin to Sarah Lucas, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Zlatan Vukosavljevic. In this way, West subversively smuggled two dozen of his artist-friends into the biennial.

Encounters with West were electric. He possessed a unique wit and charm, and his desire to communicate was, I think, nourished by a fundamental vulnerability. He was often surrounded by an entourage of young artists, thinkers, and marginal types. The last time we went with his studio staff to eat lunch at his favorite Viennese café, West ordered a full meal (main course, soup, etc.). He cleaned his plate carefully, leaving no spots, and then did the same with his cutlery, which he posed back at the side of the plate with the folded napkin. The waiter clearing the table was beside himself. There, suddenly, was a gleaming bare plate with the silverware laid at its side, polished as though it were freshly washed and he was ready to be served.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

Bice Curiger is a curator at Kunsthaus Zürich and the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Parkett.