South African Consulate-General, HKSAR/ MSAR presents the first photo exhibition of Jurgen Schadeberg-"The Black and White Fifties in South Africa” at Hong Kong Art Centre, 4/F Pao Galleries from 27 September to 7 October 2012. World famous photo journalist Jurgen Schadeberg, captures some of the most pivotal moments of the anti apartheid struggle.

His work for the radically explosive and socially relevant magazine The Drum chronicles the lifestyles of the ‘urban’ Black South Africans, who were made up of Africans, Indians and Coloureds. Featured are photographs of struggle icons such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Yusuf Dadoo and Bishop Trevor Huddleston. Leaders were born in a time of injustice, oppression and segregation. Legacies were created. These photographs show, through their images, the determined triumph of the human spirit, not only in lofty, political spaces, but in the lives of ordinary people, going about their daily business.

In the words of Jurgen Schadeberg: “There was an invisible wall between the two worlds. The Black World, or "Non European World" as described by white society, was culturally and economically rejected by the White World. Only servants and menial workers could enter the White World. In the fifties The Black World was becoming culturally and politically very dynamic, whereas the White World seemed to me to be isolated, cocooned, colonial and ignorant of the Black World. My images from the vibrant fifties Black World, "the rejected society", have been extensively covered in South Africa because I felt it was important that both blacks and whites should see what the Verwoerdian ideology had successfully destroyed."