Occasionally South African swop shops (pawn shops) have some historic photographic gems on offer, as was the experience just prior to Covid-19 lockdown at one such Cape Town based swop shop. The owner of the shop went scratching when asked for old photographs by the author.
Out came a box with some significant historical images, amongst them four photographs relating to a single South African maritime catastrophe.
1) Catastrophes photographed
Early catastrophes were popular photographic events. World-wide a variety of examples exists of disasters photographically captured - be that the consequences of blizzards, hailstorms, floods, fires, earthquakes, air or shipping disasters. Two immediate examples that come to mind are the San Francisco earthquake (1906) and the Hindenburg air disaster (1937).
A quick search on South African natural catastrophes from before 1920 indicates that no curated collections of such images are in existence. One man-made disaster which was well documented photographically was the Johannesburg dynamite explosion of February 1896. The underlying theme of this article is however that of a natural disaster that was photographed.
Braamfontein Dynamite Explosion (A Johannesburg Album)
Some South African photographic evidence of natural disasters do exist, also in the form of picture postcards, such as the Pretoria hailstorm (November 1913) or the Standerton floods (January 1911).
There was money to be made from...
