‘Pictures like this meant I couldn’t return to South Africa until apartheid was abolished’: Steve Bloom’s best shot

I spent my early adulthood in South Africa during the apartheid era. In 1974, the government passed a law stipulating that all lessons for black children had to be in Afrikaans, which most could not speak, and which was considered the language of the oppressor. By 1976, Black schoolchildren took to the streets of Soweto to protest and were met with police violence, with over 176 deaths. It was then that the tide turned, the protest movement grew and people worldwide became more aware of the injustices of apartheid.

Sensing the country was on the cusp of change, I went out to try to photograph what was happening around me. I was in my early 20s and working for a company that printed magazines, so I’d take my own pictures at weekends. I’d had no photographic training and because I could hardly afford film, I bought bulk reels of black and white, which were cheaper. I had to limit the number of exposures I could make due to the cost, and used cat litter trays for developing the silver gelatin prints.

I had a manual Canon FTb camera and a standard 50mm lens, which approximates the field of view of the eye. I would visit and photograph squatter towns where Black people were living as family units in defiance of the labour laws, and I also went to District Six, a mixed-race community where homes were demolished and the inhabitants evicted to make way for white housing. I’d knock on doors and ask if I could photograph people in their homes.

When I took pictures of people on the streets, they were often absorbed in their own worlds. I spotted the couple in this photograph in Green Point, Cape Town, near where I lived. The man was tenderly caring for his sick partner, and a smartly dressed woman walked past them, totally oblivious to their existence. The man looked up at her and the white of his eye caught the light as I took the picture. There are two other photographs I took showing a pair of white kids walking past the same couple without appearing to notice them, and then on their return journey, eating ice creams they’d just bought.

I felt my pictures needed to be seen and a local publisher was interested in producing a book, which reached the dummy stage before he decided the project was going to be too risky. But a photograph I sent to the British Journal of Photography made their front page in 1977, so that same month I packed a box of prints into a suitcase and flew to Heathrow. I only had a couple of dozen or so prints, and lent these to the International Defence and Aid Fund, which campaigned to defend people in race trials and raise awareness of apartheid internationally. My pictures were exhibited and published widely and, as a consequence, I was unable to return to South Africa until apartheid was abolished over 13 years later.

Under apartheid, anti-racist behaviour was spurned by the government, interracial sex was illegal and the best jobs, housing and education were strictly reserved for whites. One of the other photographs I brought to the UK is a portrait of a man I worked with at the printing company. He was an experienced technician, but I remember once asking him to prepare two exposures on a contact sheet. He had to remind me he was only allowed to make one exposure, as two were classed as “skilled” work, which was reserved for white technicians.

Apartheid, meaning “apartness”, was a deliberate process of engendering indifference between the races, which I think this photograph demonstrates. When you walk into my new exhibition at Leicester Art Gallery, it’s the first picture that strikes you, because it has been printed a couple of metres tall. There’s a resonance when people realise that such social and economic differences are still present 45 years later. The difference with this image is that the couple were denied equal opportunities by law.

After the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela, I trawled through the old negatives, discovering images I’d forgotten I had. I became a wildlife photographer in midlife and now it feels like the photographs I took at 23 belong to another lifetime. They act as a poignant reminder of why history must never be buried or forgotten and how we need to be constantly reminded of such injustices to help prevent them from happening again.

Steve Bloom’s CV

Born: Johannesburg, 1953
Trained: Self-taught
Influences: “Photojournalist W Eugene Smith, with his powerful features in Life magazine.”
High point: “Seeing my first photography book roll off the press. It’s the knowledge that the images will be seen. I think reaching an audience is a joy for any photographer.”
Low point: “The phone call from a processing lab in the analogue film days to say that there had been a chemical ‘incident’ and the films I had brought back from a shoot in Kenya had been destroyed.”
Top tip: “In this age of billions of pictures being made each day, it’s tempting to take multiple pictures of the same subject without actually concentrating too much on composition, lighting and timing. Photograph as if you only get one chance at it, and that discipline will sharpen your creative mind.”