The 1981 Springbok Tour

John Miller produced over 900 35mm color transparencies of these events, most of which have never been seen publicly. This book presents a new critical selection of images, rescanned and remastered from the original transparencies. The majority of well-known photographs from the tour are in black and white, artificially distancing us in time and offering premature absolution compared to Miller’s unavoidably vibrant images. In addition to the social documentary aspect, this publication frames the work as occupying a major place in both national and international photographic art history, when handheld color photography was only recently beginning to be seen as art.

In addition to critical texts, this publication reproduces alongside images transcriptions from field audio recorded by Miller, capturing conversations and disputes from the front lines, snippets of radio coverage, and creating an immersive audio-visual record of these historical events.