Photographs by Cloete Breytenbach Arrive at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Cloete Breytenbach (1933–2019) began his photojournalism career in 1951 at the newspaper Die Burger in Cape Town. His work quickly crossed South African borders, and his photographs were soon being published in prestigious European outlets such as the Daily Express and Paris Match.
He co-founded a South African photographic agency and became known for his coverage of topics such as apartheid and military conflicts, producing reports on Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Congo, South Africa, as well as the Yom Kippur and Vietnam wars. His photographs travelled widely, being exhibited in the United States, Europe and Japan.
Cloete Breytenbach’s legacy includes a set of photographs of Albert Luthuli (Nobel Peace Prize laureate and anti-apartheid leader), which forms part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His images enriched works such as Cape Town – The Fairest Cape and The Terror Fighters – Portuguese War in Angola, as well as Savimbi’s Angola and The Spirit of District Six, of which he was himself the author. In the final years of his life, Cloete Breytenbach dedicated himself to independent television documentary production.
The body of images now donated to the Foundation offers a singular and intimate perspective on the lives of Portuguese and Angolan soldiers during the “War of Liberation” and the subsequent Civil War. The photographs depict soldiers engaged in everyday, unexpectedly ordinary activities: washing clothes, reading, socialising or flirting, writing letters — showing that the photographer chose to focus his narrative on the “dead time” of military life, on what unfolded between battles. In his own words, “a soldier’s life extended beyond killing people”, and this is evident in the dispassionate approach and the documentary, impartial nature of his work, which intentionally kept death and the brutality of the battlefield outside the frame.
These images were shown to the public only once, in 2018, at the MIRA Photography Gallery in Porto, in an exhibition titled A Guerra em Angola 1967–1987, curated by Annette Badenhorst.
The donation of this group of photographs to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was initiated by the curator, who owns the prints, and was endorsed by León Breytenbach, heir and holder of the economic rights to the photographer’s estate.
The collection will be preserved by the Art Library and will be available for consultation by prior appointment.