Newbury D (2013) People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine (with a foreword by Amanda Hopkinson and essays by Vivian Bickford-Smith and Sean Field). London: Black Dog Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-907-31785-9
People Apart presents a striking collection of photographs by Bryan Heseltine, which came to light as a result of Newbury's research. (He is currently the only researcher working on this collection.) The images were made in the late 1940s and early 1950s and provide a rich and intimate description of life in a number of townships and areas of the city: Windermere, the Bo-Kaap, District Six, Langa and Nyanga.
Newbury contextualises Heseltine's photography through biographical and sociohistorical research, and situates this body of work within its contemporary context, as well as asking what Heseltine's images offer today, in the post-apartheid era. The initial research and the resulting publication were supported by grants from Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art.
Newbury also curated exhibitions of Heseltine's photography at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and District Six Museum in Cape Town. He has given public lectures on the project collection at the Photographer’s Gallery in London (April 2011), the Pitt Rivers Museum (November 2011) and District Six Museum, Cape Town (as part of the Human Rights Day programme, March 2011). The project also features as a slide show and interview on the BBC website. He has given invited talks at the Victoria and Albert Museum conference, Figures and Fictions: The Ethics and Poetics of Photographic Depictions of People, which was held in conjunction with a major photography exhibition at the V&A; at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape as part of the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar Series; and at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University.
As a result of Newbury's research, part of the negative collection has been donated to the permanent collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
