Event information
The Duggan-Cronin Gallery is a photographic museum displaying the photographs of Alfred Duggan-Cronin, Aubrey Elliot, Jean Morris and Alice Mertens. This collection has been described as the most significant collection of Southern African ethnographic photography in the world.
The story of Duggan-Cronin and his photographs is one of a Kimberley mine compound guard who bought a cheap box camera and became a South African photographic legend. The Irishman, with his assistant Richard Madela by his side, travelled the length and breadth of the country photographing the lives of indigenous people for 50 years.
The Thandabantu exhibition is just a fraction of his collection. Duggan-Cronin’s photographs are priceless records of traditional settings and a timeless record of a distant era in southern Africa.
The Duggan-Cronin Gallery is a satellite of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley. It occupies a former dwelling known as The Lodge. In the late 1930s De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd made The Lodge available to Duggan-Cronin to establish what he progressively called at the time, the 'Bantu Gallery'.
Exhibits were arranged by tribe in the various rooms of the house. These were re-arranged in the 1980s to incorporate a historical narrative, while concerted work on the Duggan-Cronin collections resulted in a much more substantial display reconfiguration in the early 2000s.
