Background
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin was born on May 17, 1874 in Ireland.
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin was born on May 17, 1874 in Ireland.
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin was educated at Mount St Mary's College in Derbyshire, England.
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin went to South Africa in 1897, working as a night watchman for the DeBeers Company, returning in 1904 to Ireland, where he purchased a box camera. Upon his second venture to South Africa, he worked as a guard and dispenser at a convict hospital and began photographing tribal members with whom he came in contact. Alfred then started traveling the countryside in order to photograph tribespeople in their natural habitat, covering 80,000 miles by about 1938. The photographer went to London for exhibitions of his work in 1924 and 1931 and continued his other travels, including trips to Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa, all the while photographing.
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin established South Africa's first Bantu Picture Gallery (1924) and created a unique collection of native beadwork, leather work, implements, dresses and bows and arrows. With funding and housing provided by the DeBeers Company, he donated the collection and 750 framed photographs of tribespeople to the City of Kimberley.
The photographer worked with Imperial Sovereign glass plates, contact-printing his negatives on "Seltona." For a darkroom he variously used a tent, native huts, lean-to shelters made around his car, and finally, as a gift from DeBeers in 1938, a portable darkroom.
(The Nguni: Volume3 Section V: Baca, Hlubi, Xesibe)
1934(The Bantu tribes of South Africa)
1935