Archive: Issue No. 64, December 2002

David Goldblatt's photographs have documented the prosaic details of South African life for over five decades now. Whether photographing the stolid white suburb of Boksburg, or recording the invisible assault of apartheid by taking an early morning bus ride with the transported of KwaNdebele, his photographs have consistently impressed because of their eloquent humanism.

Born in 1930, he is the son of Lithuanian Jews who fled the pogroms in the 1890's. His family ran a small men's wear business in Randfontein, a gold mining town southwest of Johannesburg. Although he took serendipitous photographs during his youth, his first obligation was to the family business. After the death of his father Eli Goldblatt in 1962, he sold the family business to pursue a career as a full time photographer. He compares the elation of his release from the duties of the family business as one of letting loose an untied balloon.

David Goldblatt's unerring photographic records of South African life have concentrated on landscape and structure, people and context. His output is predominantly rooted in that most turbulent of times, high apartheid. David Goldblatt, however, remains a prolific talent and his recent shift to colour photography has only served to enhance the photographer's revealing portraits of apartheid's aftermath - South Africa today.

"In his attempts to remain dispassionate, Goldblatt has not always succeeded in avoiding the decorative trap. Yet his work is both seductive and beautiful. His mastery of the harsh qualities of South African light is unsurpassed."
Sunday Times, 06 September 1998

"Among Mr. Goldblatt's virtues as a photographer � what distinguishes him from a propagandist � is his refusal to telegraph or beseech, not because he is morally ambivalent toward his subjects but because reality, when you live in a complicated situation, is never easy."
Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, August 24, 2001

"His achievement, though, is as a photographer not of large or terrible events but of conditions and states. By focusing not on the central events of a nation's chronic crisis but on the specific textures, objects, and incidents of its daily experience, Goldblatt has compiled an overall indictment and a panoramic history."
David Frankel, Artforum, February, 2002

"Precise in description, Goldblatt's photographs are also acute in historical and political perception. They provide a sense of the texture of daily life, and an important piece of missing information regarding life under apartheid in South Africa."
Susan Kismaric, Associate Curator, The Museum of Modern Art

When I started taking photographs again in 1998, after completing South Africa: the Structure of Things Then, I experienced no bump. It was almost a seamless transition; seamless in the sense that I found my concerns were exactly the same as during the apartheid years. This surprised me because during the years of apartheid there was obviously a much more potent sense of purpose and of concern.

It was then that I realised my concern is with values. Looking at Boksburg, for instance, I was asking myself how it was possible to be so apparently normal, moral, upright - which almost all those citizens were - in such a appallingly abnormal, immoral, bizarre situation? This goes back to values, to how one balances these extraordinary differences in values." (18.11.2002)

On Politics: "Certainly politics has always been on my mind, politics in the broadest sense. The Transported of KwaNdebele, was certainly the most explicitly political, while In Boksburg was a more oblique and muted engagement with politics. In all of the work I have done though I have been engaged with the consequences of our actions and of our values." (18.11.2002)

On Colour Photography: "I have been enjoying working in colour, but it is still a bit too colourful for me. One of the reasons why I didn't persist with colour in my personal work was because it was too sweet, too colourful. Using these new technological processes I desaturate most of the colour, I take colour out. This has made it more interesting to me." (18.11.2002)

In 2001 a retrospective exhibition of David Goldblatt's work was held in the Axa Gallery, New York. 'David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years', co-curated by Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor, was produced by the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA] in collaboration with the Axa Gallery. It was exhibited at MACBA from February to May 2002, and is due to be exhibited in Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels and Munich before coming to South Africa in 2004. David Goldblatt's photographic essays on Boksburg, as well as his recent studies of Johannesburg were on exhibition at Documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany in the month of September, 2002.

In the sixties David Goldblatt initiated a series of investigations into the mines surrounding Johannesburg. Writing in theNew York Times, Michael Kimmelman made the following observation. "His portraits of miners, like many of his best works, exercise a more subtle humanity." Kimmelman continues by stating that: "A picture of a black "team leader" pedalling a white mine captain on a bike nearly suggests Buster Keaton because of the way its wit tempers deeper emotion, the photograph respectfully acknowledging a viewer's ability to grasp its basic message without being lectured."

Goldblatt himself is less forgiving of the work from this period. "With regards the work I was doing in the sixties in the gold mines, I was probing and prodding my interest in the structures of the mines. At that stage I was teetering actually. I was concerned very largely with the graphic nature of what I was looking at. I think this was a bit of red herring for me. On The Mines is most unsatisfactory in this sense. It is the one project that has a distinct change in pace as it goes from beginning to end. The beginning is very much concerned with graphics and with conveying visual effects. I am still concerned with this, but to a lesser extent."

For a more detailed chronological overview of David Goldblatt's career, visit www.southphoto.com. The site includes a link to Michael Kimmelman's in-depth discussion of David Goldblatt's oeuvre.