As a scholar of Black photography and visual studies, I am drawn to the relationship between visibility, history, and knowledge. Much of my work consists of teaching my students about the visual logics of history: How do images shape what we can and cannot know about the world? How might we utilize visual languages to render Black histories that have been erased, buried, or misremembered, and who benefits from their elision? The local history of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM)—a grassroots anti-apartheid effort initiated within the walls of a major camera company—shows just how revolutionary a critical lens can be.
PRWM was one of the first successful worker-led divestment campaigns of the anti-apartheid movement. Admittedly, I only recently learned about this movement while researching Black Southern migration to Boston in the twentieth century. North to Boston: Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England by Blake Gumprecht features an interview with a Black resident who worked at Polaroid from 1961 through the 1980s and reminisced about his positive experience on the job and the decency of the company. When asked about the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, he said he was not aware of the group.1 I was surprised to hear that a Black employee from the same moment couldn’t recall the radical movement that happened right in his midst.
In pursuit of more information, I came across a video-recorded lecture featuring one of the movement’s head organizers, Caroline Hunter. I pressed play and became Hunter’s audience as she retold the story of one of the first anti-apartheid protests against a corporation in the US.
The movement started in 1970 with an unusual sighting on a bulletin board at the Polaroid headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Hunter, who was hired as the first Black research scientist at Polaroid,2 explained: “One day, myself and Ken Williams—who was a colleague at the time—looked around at a bulletin board and saw an ID card, just like your driver’s licenses. It had the face of one of his colleagues from his shop—the photographic group—but his name wasn’t there. He had an African name and below his name was Union of the Mines, and below that was Department of South Africa.”3
I tried to place myself in the room with Hunter and Williams, eyeing the board: a card I would have to get up close to see; a working document that affixes a small picture of a fellow employee to the name and affiliation of someone an ocean away; a collage of otherwise ordinary information with an ominous logic yet to be discovered. What was this card for, and why would it be posted on the bulletin board for others to see?
Hunter continued, “We picked it up and looked at it, and Ken said, ‘I didn’t know Polaroid was in South Africa.’” To this day, Hunter is uncertain what the ID card represented or how it got there, but its presence tipped them off to start investigating.
Polaroid had the reputation of being a liberal company. Hunter recalled that the directors knew their names and would greet them in the hallways. It was nonunion, but it offered good benefits, education support, and promotion opportunities.4 Hunter was a transplant from New Orleans and a first-generation college graduate who had scored a dream job fresh out of Xavier University in Louisiana. A chemist, Hunter accepted the offer at Polaroid to become a research scientist in the color labs. She met Williams—whom she later married—at Polaroid while he was working as a photographer with the company.5
When they stood together in front of the bulletin board, studying the strange identification card, Hunter remembered lessons she learned about South Africa and apartheid from a progressive educator she had back in high school. “I didn’t know they [Polaroid] were in South Africa,” she told her audience, “but I know that’s a bad place for Black people.”
Hunter and Williams left the card where it was and did their own research. They learned that Polaroid’s technology was being used by the South African government to produce “passbooks” that Black South Africans were forced to carry. “Pass Laws” restricted Africans’ freedom of movement, limiting where they could live and work and who they could visit, including their own relatives. Placing the card in its urgent political context, the employees decided to take action—and they created their own visual and print materials to leave in their wake.
The PRWM archive is available for public view through the African Activist Archive at Michigan State University. I studied this archive. Their print materials reveal just how intentional the movement was about their visual strategies and how to make the public see the connection between the ordinary technology of a camera and the extraordinary violations of apartheid.
Polaroid’s relationship with South Africa via these passbooks would have been out of step with broader liberal attitudes toward apartheid at the time. The United Nations was embroiled in a decade-long attempt to end apartheid. Throughout the 1960s, the UN called for economic sanctions against South Africa, and they requested that “all States and organizations suspend cultural, educational, sporting, and other exchanges with organizations or institutions in South Africa which practice apartheid.”6 Polaroid’s activity in South Africa would signal not only a conflict with their perceived liberalism, but a direct involvement in the apartheid regime that fellow nations, companies, and organizations were actively trying to dismantle.
The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement demanded that Polaroid ban all sales of their products to the South African government, redirect their profits to African liberation movements, and publicly decry apartheid.7
On October 5, 1970, Hunter and Williams began publicizing Polaroid’s activities to their fellow employees by distributing flyers and organizing small protests. When they requested meetings with company leadership, Polaroid initially refused to meet with them or consider their demands. They responded instead with a memorandum stating: “Polaroid has not sold its I.D. equipment to the government of South Africa for use in the apartheid program.”8 They clarified that they sold their identification equipment to the South African Army and Air Force, not the apartheid regime. With this statement, Polaroid obfuscated the details of their distribution and usage of their products to deny discriminatory intent.
On October 9, Williams said he was threatened by Polaroid’s management to “be quiet” about Polaroid’s activities or his job was on the line. He was then let go, though Polaroid said he resigned.9
By the end of November 1970, the movement had drawn enough attention to Polaroid’s activities to receive a response. In the wake of PRWM’s activism, Polaroid published a statement in Boston newspapers on their labor activities in South Africa. They sent four men to investigate labor practices at their distributor, Frank & Hirsch, and the usage of their products. The result of the investigation was the creation of the “Polaroid Experiment,” which was a one-year scheme to improve the wages and conditions for all Black workers at Frank & Hirsch. They did not meet the movement’s demands to pull out of South Africa.10 Following the investigation, Polaroid publicized their intent to stay in business with South Africa through full-page ads in twenty weekly Black newspapers, as well as in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and several other major news outlets.11
The movement continued to call for a global boycott of Polaroid until they disengaged from South Africa and condemned apartheid. On February 3, 1971, Hunter (who still worked at Polaroid at the time) and Williams testified against their employer and spoke out against Polaroid’s engagement in South Africa at the United Nations Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid.
Seven days later, on February 10, Polaroid fired Hunter.12
Although she lost her job, being fired freed Hunter, Williams, and their movement peers to publicize Polaroid’s involvement in apartheid as widely and boldly as they could without fear of further backlash from within the company. The movement reproduced the same kind of unassuming, revelatory, and tactile encounter they had with the ID card through posters, newspaper ads, leaflets, and pamphlets. These materials continued to circulate among Polaroid employees—some of whom wondered why the coworkers should care about an issue “10,000 miles away”—and through fellow anti-apartheid activists and organizations locally, nationally, and internationally.13 Familiar with Polaroid’s brand identity, PRWM activists used Polaroid’s amiable and casual voice in photography—a camera that does the technical work for you, a camera that can capture cherished moments, big and small—to draw out the everyday structural violence that the passbooks imposed on Black South Africans.
An early PRWM leaflet mimics an advertisement for the Polaroid Colorpack III to surface Polaroid’s insidious capture. In 1971, Polaroid updated its popular Colorpack instant film camera with sharper color image technology, a new strap for portability, and fast printing that could deliver a picture in fifteen seconds. Polaroid promised the ease of capture for the everyday enthusiast. The PRWM leaflet names the new camera right at the top of the page and frames its innovation as a tool of imprisonment, announcing: “POLAROID COLORPACK III… …Imprisons a Black South African Every 60 Seconds.” Beneath the header is a call to action rather than a call to purchase: “Call for an international boycott of all POLAROID products.”14
The two-page leaflet builds on this commercial critique through juxtapositions of Polaroid’s technical assurances and moral failures. A small ad graphic shows a stack of Polaroid pictures fronted with an image of a white woman sitting on a beach. The caption framing the graphic reads, “Polaroid makes incredible wallet-size photos like this… ‘for whites only’ on the sunny beaches of South Africa.” The statement continues, “or incredible passbook I.D. photos like this….” The ellipses lead into an image of a passbook belonging to a Black South African man, his face partially obscured by the cut of the photograph and the bureaucratic stamp. The entire leaflet follows this template, collaging Polaroid advertisements with a breakdown of the passbook’s logic and a list of offenses as well as photographs of passbook enforcement in action. The PRWM used print culture to forge proximity between the seemingly innocuous Polaroid brand and its direct involvement in the violence of apartheid. The camera itself becomes the driving metaphor of capture.
A month after Hunter’s firing, PRWM collaborated with the Africa Research Group—a collective fighting American imperialism in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s—to publish “Polaroid and South Africa.” The thirty-two-page pamphlet was published on March 21, 1971, the eleventh anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre where police murdered demonstrators protesting anti-Black pass laws. The pamphlet’s cover extends PRWM’s tactic of using Polaroid’s branding against itself: a logo at the bottom wedges a camera graphic between the words “Boycott” and “Polaroid”; a Polaroid image at center pictures a police officer checking the passbooks of two African men, framed by the question “Did Polaroid shoot every South African black?” The image and question surface the dual operation of the camera as visual and bodily captor. The second page, however, offers a new image, one that confronts not only Polaroid’s operation, but the viewers’ complicity in the violence of apartheid.
A photograph of African freedom fighters fills the page. Black men sit in rows on the ground, arms rested on their knees and cradling guns that stand in attention. The men stare in confrontation, but their bodies are braced, grounded, protective. The man in front has his brow furrowed toward the sun and toward the camera. They’re poised for battle, but whether they’ll need to use these weapons is up to us, viewers near and far, continuing to watch state violence unfold. The purpose of the pamphlet captions the photograph, arriving at a rallying call in Xhosa—an indigenous South African language—and in English: “In honor of those who have died and suffered in the struggle for the liberation of South Africa. Amandla Ngawethu! Power to the People!”
The pamphlet’s closing illustration shows the extent of the camera’s destructive capacities. A couple poses for a portrait, stylized in gendered Pan-African revolutionary fashion: a man with an Afro and dark sunglasses next to a woman with a headwrap, nestled into his casual, protective embrace. Her half-moon eyes mirror the shades covering his, at once seeing and refusing to be seen. The couple is met with a self-developing Polaroid Land camera, its accordion eye pointed right at them. Its body floats: no one’s hands are holding the machine, no tripod in view. The rear door opens to expose the image developing on the film: the same two subjects in chains. They are draped in fabric, faces forward, eyes empty; necks and wrists bound; not touching each other because they can’t touch each other; standing in grass and backed against a barbed wire fence. The Polaroid Land camera: a tool of recapture to equip the apartheid regime and resume Black enslavement in the Western order. “Polaroid and South Africa” begins and ends in warning.
The PRWM continued their campaign for the next several years, producing print materials to mobilize public boycott. I met with Hunter over lunch in Central Square to ask her more about PRWM’s publicity strategies. She tells me that they parked themselves by subway stairs and entrances to the Massachusetts Turnpike, passing out flyers and leaflets. They spoke about the movement on radio shows, and they were profiled in major media outlets in the US, England, and Tanzania.15 PRWM continued to build public support and push liberals, consumers, and organizations to hold Polaroid accountable. In 1977, the company finally acquiesced. Polaroid parted from Frank & Hirsch and ended all direct sales to South Africa. After putting their livelihoods on the line, testifying on the world stage, and producing a visual and material record of their efforts, the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement won.
How a mundane sighting—an ID card on a bulletin board—grew into a monumental divestment campaign is as much about the material strategies of activism as it is about public boycott, peaceful protests, and UN resolutions. Back then, the PRWM needed us to physically see the connection between American capitalism and South African apartheid, between photography and policing, between Cambridge and Sharpeville. Their print culture taught us how.
Today, we’re being told to unsee—to unknow—the entangled operations of Western Imperialism and the suffering it not only produces but requires. The PRWM’s discursive strategy reminds us that how we view, articulate, and circulate information about human suffering—at whose hands and for what gains—matters.
At lunch, I have to ask Caroline Hunter what lessons the PRWM holds for us today as we register the genocide unfolding before our eyes in Gaza and how to think about media coverage that portrays Palestinians as culpable for Israel’s military violence, occupation, and war crimes.
“Well, I think part of it is because we don’t have truth serum in our history curriculum. America’s long been in denial with its own apartheid history. I grew up under segregation in New Orleans, which I would argue is America’s apartheid—as pervasive as apartheid, as brutal as apartheid,” Hunter replied. “What we need to know is that apartheid was legal, the Holocaust was legal, slavery was legal, colonialism was legal. Legality is a matter of power, not justice. Every human being deserves the same as the people who are going to be reading this article … the ability to feed their children, to love who they want, to live where they want, to thrive with good water, clean air… . We owe the Palestinians our shoulders, our struggle, our support, just as we want justice for everyone else in the world.”16
Those of us who desire the liberation of all oppressed people might not find it in the headlines. But we turn to the feed and the page to articulate what liberation must look and feel like. Our voices and images carry and multiply, refusing to let memory be manipulated. While remembered for the success of its divestment campaign, the archival legacy of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement extends into the present day, and we can take from it what we need. We might turn to them now as a model of embodied, material witnessing.
—1 Blake Gumprecht, North to Boston: Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England (Oxford University Press, 2023), 53.
—2 Maia Colman, “An Early Voice in the Struggle to End Apartheid Remains Strong,” The Vineyard Gazette, February 5, 2021, https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2021/02/05/early-voice-struggle-end-apartheid-remains-strong.
—3 Caroline Hunter, “The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement,” public lecture, Bard Graduate Center, May 23, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vd75g8vlU0&t=743s.
—4 Gumprecht, North to Boston, 53.
—5 Hunter, “The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement.”
—6 “Key Dates in the UN Campaign Against Apartheid,” United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/un_against_apartheid.shtml. Accessed March 26, 2024.
—7 “Polaroid Colorpack III …… Imprisons a Black South African Every 60 Seconds,” undated, c. 1971. Private Collection of David Wiley and Christine Root, Boston Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa Papers, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collection, https://africanactivist.msu.edu/record/210-849-27829/.
—8 “Statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement to the United Nations Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid, February 3, 1971.” Boston Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa Papers, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collection.
—9 [“The firings of Caroline Hunter and Clyde Walton on February 10, 1971 by Polaroid Corporation are further proof of the racist response to the three demands of the PRWM…”], press release, February 11, 1971. Boston Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa Papers, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collection.
—10 “Statement by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement to the United Nations Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid, February 3, 1971.”
—11 George M. Houser, “The Polaroid Approach to South Africa,” The Christian Century, February 24, 1971, https://projects.kora.matrix.msu.edu/app/files/210/808/9943/1600876425.al.sff.document.acoa000349.pdf.
—12 [“The firings of Caroline Hunter and Clyde Walton…”], press release.
—13 Hunter, “The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement.”
—14 “Polaroid Colorpack III …… Imprisons a Black South African Every 60 Seconds.”
—15 Conversation with Caroline Hunter, Central Square, Cambridge, April 9, 2024.
—16 Ibid.
