Movie Snaps

The View from Corporation Chambers: How a Casual 1970 Photograph Captured Cape Town's Hidden History

It is a strange thing to live long enough to watch your casual, throwaway moments turn into historical monuments.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about 1970. It was a year of sharp contrasts, bright Cape light, and the internal shifts of a young artist trying to find his visual language. Back then, I had the privilege of a painting studio on the top floor of the Corporation Chambers building in the heart of Cape Town next to the City Hall Hotel. It was a large space, dominated by a curved window that looked directly down onto Darling Street and out across the expanse of the Grand Parade. From up there, suspended above the concrete, I was aware of the city's heartbeat. The Grand Parade was a theater of the everyday: the shouting of fruit sellers, the rumble of city buses, the laughter of shoppers, and the constant movement of thousands of people navigating their lives under Table Mountain.

Directly below my studio, on the street level, my uncle Gus Muller owned the chemist shop, Lite-Kem let me use part of the empty top floor.. I can still recall the sensory overlap of that time—the smell of turpentine, oil paints, and linseed oil in my studio, mingling with the faint, clinical scent of pharmaceuticals rising up from Uncle Gus's shop when I went downstairs.

It was during this period that I began to feel the pull of photography. I wanted to capture the world in fractions of a second, not just the long hours of the canvas. So, I made the pilgrimage to Audiolens in the Parkade Building on Parliament Street. There, after much deliberation, I paid R120—which felt like a fortune at the time—for a Pentax Spotmatic. That camera was a masterpiece of engineering. It felt heavy in my hands, its light meter a tiny needle of possibility.

When I brought it back to my Corporation Chambers studio, I was itching to test it out. I opened the window and  loaded a roll of color slide film, looked through the viewfinder, and focused on the street below. Right on the corner of the Parade, directly across the street from me, stood a busy little building. The sign on it read, in bold letters: MOVIE SNAPS.

I was, of course, aware of the street photographers who operated down in Darling Street. You couldn't walk through town without seeing them. They were a fixture of the pavement, strolling with their cameras, snapping away at pedestrians. But like most people who worked in the city every day, I thought nothing of it at the time. It was just part of the local scenery, as ordinary as the pigeons on the Parade or the flower sellers on Adderley Street. Trying out my new Pentax, I framed the Movie Snaps building in my viewfinder, adjusted the focus ring until the building and the signage came into sharp relief, and pressed the shutter. Click.

I took the shot, wound the film forward, and moved on to other subjects. I had no idea that this single, casual click of a shutter was catching a ghost. I had no idea that I was photographing the epicenter of an extraordinary cultural phenomenon, an archive of quiet elegance, and a subject that, decades later, would become the focus of intense academic research, major museum exhibitions, and deeply moving contemporary art. To me, in 1970, it was just a test shot. Today, I realize it was a witness to an era.

In recent years, I have been astonished to discover the profound historical weight that has been uncovered around that little building I photographed from my window. Researchers like Professor Siona O’Connell have dedicated years to studying Movie Snaps. When I read their work, the pieces of my own past began to fall into a completely new, heartbreakingly beautiful perspective.

Movie Snaps was founded at the dawn of the Second World War by Abraham Hurwitz, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who had fled Europe. For over forty years, Movie Snaps operated as a visual machine of incredible scale. The photographers they employed—many of them young, self-taught men like Noor Ebrahim—would stand on the pavements of Darling Street, Adderley Street, and the Grand Parade.

The mechanics of their trade were fascinating. Every morning, the photographer would draw a simple chalk line on the pavement, exactly six meters from where he stood. He would preset his focus, his shutter speed, and his aperture to match that exact distance. As ordinary Capetonians walked down the street, they would cross that invisible boundary. Snap. The photographer would capture them mid-stride, step forward, hand them a small, numbered ticket, and tell them to collect their photo at Movie Snaps in forty-eight hours. If you went to the kiosk and paid a small fee—one shilling and a sixpence back then—you would receive a beautiful, postcard-sized black-and-white print of yourself.

When you look at the actual Movie Snaps photographs that survived—the ones kept safe in family Bibles, old shoeboxes, and biscuit tins—a stunning narrative emerges. These snapshots show women walking past the Grand Parade resplendent in hand-stitched dresses, wearing flared bell-bottoms, and boasting perfectly coiffed beehive hairstyles. They show young men walking "to the nines" in dapper suits and hats, looking like jazz musicians or Hollywood stars. They show children in crisp, smocked pinafores and proud mothers holding their hands. Going "to town" in those days was an event. It required a performance of dignity. By dressing in their absolute best and purchasing these images, ordinary Capetonians were committing an act of self-love and self-representation. They were looking directly into the camera lens and declaring: I exist. I am beautiful. I am human. And this city belongs to me, if only for the length of this pavement.

As I sat in my painting studio in 1970, worrying about light and perspective, the people walking below me were actively preserving their humanity through these tiny silver-gelatin prints. They were creating a visual archive of the ordinary.

It is incredibly moving to realize how these photographs functioned in the years that followed my time in Corporation Chambers. In 2015, Professor O'Connell's landmark exhibition, Movie Snaps: Cape Town Remembers Differently, opened at the District Six Museum's Homecoming Centre. The opening was packed to the rafters. People from all walks of life arrived, many clutching their own family Movie Snaps. Since then, the creative community has continued to breathe life into this archive. The artist Marsi van de Heuvel created a breathtaking series of paintings based on these street photographs, using oil paint on raw linen to capture the fragile, fading nature of our collective memory. And just recently, in April 2025, the Michaelis Upper Gallery hosted The Love Letter, an exhibition commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the Movie Snaps documentary, reminding us that these ghosts are still very much alive, walking among us.

When I look back at my own trajectory, and the casual photograph I took from my curved window in 1970, I am filled with a profound sense of awe. I think of my uncle Gus down at Lite-Kem, serving customers of all backgrounds, unaware of how the urban fabric around him would change. I think of my Pentax Spotmatic, a camera bought in a moment of youthful artistic curiosity, which happened to align its lens with a monument of social history.

My painting studio is gone, the Lite-Kem of my youth is a memory, and Darling Street has transformed. The Corporation Chambers building is still there, but today it is home to a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). Yet, that moment in 1970 remains fixed in color on a tiny slide.