On the Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed, (1975) The Structure of Things Then (1998)
David Goldblatt (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South Africanphotographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid[1] and more recently that country's landscapes. He described himself as a “self-appointed observer and critic of the society into which I was born.”[2] He had numerous publications to his name.
Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province,[1] and was the youngest of the three sons of Eli and Olga Goldblatt. His grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania around 1893, having fled the persecution of Jews there.[3]
Goldblatt worked in his father's men's outfitters, attended Krugersdorp High School, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a degree in commerce.[4][5]
Monochrome photography[]
Goldblatt began photographing in 1948 and documented developments in South Africa through the period of apartheid up until his death in 2018. In Goldblatt's view, "During those years color seemed too sweet a medium to express the anger, disgust and fear that apartheid inspired".[2]
During Apartheid, Goldblatt in his work The Transported of KwaNdebele documented the excruciatingly long and uncomfortable twice-daily bus journeys of black workers who lived in the segregated "homelands" northeast of Pretoria. The conditions have not changed that much for workers since, he explains [in 2007]. "The bulk of people who live there still have to travel to Pretoria by road. It's still a very long commute for them every day – two to eight hours,” he says. "It will take generations to undo the consequences of Apartheid."[6]
After apartheid, Goldblatt continued to photographs of the area including the landscape.[6]
Colour photography[]
Until the end of the 1990s Goldblatt – in what he called his personal work – rarely photographed in colour.[7] It was only after working on a project involving blue asbestos in north-western Australia, and "the resulting disease and death", that he "got hooked on doing work in color [because] You can’t make it blue in black and white."[6]
This was coupled with new developments in the field of digital scanning and printing. Only when Goldblatt was able to achieve the same "depth" in his colour work that he had previously achieved in his black and white photography, did he choose to explore this field extensively.[citation needed]
Collections and publications[]
Goldblatt's work is held in major museum collections worldwide. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1998.
Interest in Goldblatt’s work increased significantly after a travelling exhibition of 51 years of his work (Barcelona, 2001), and the eleventh Documenta (Kassel, 2002). The former, which opened in the AXA Gallery in New York in 2001, offered an overview of Goldblatt’s photographic oeuvre from 1948 to 1999. At Documenta, two projects were shown: black-and-white work depicting life in the middle-class white community of Boksburg in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as examples of later colour work from the series Johannesburg Intersections.
Goldblatt's book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, published in 1998, offers an in-depth visual analysis of the relationship between South Africa's structures and the forces that shaped them, from the country's early colonial beginnings up until 1990.
Some Afrikaners Photographed. Johannesburg: Murray Crawford, 1975. (in English)
Cape Dutch Homesteads. With Margaret Courtney-Clark and John Kench. Cape Town: C Struik, 1981. ISBN0-86977-140-X. (in English)
In Boksburg. Cape Town: The Gallery Press, 1982. ISBN0-620-05933-8. (in English)
David Goldblatt: Thirty-five years of photographs, April 1983 to January 1984 / Vyf-en-dertig jaar se foto's, April 1983 tot Januarie 1984. Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1983. Small exhibition catalogue. (in Afrikaans)(in English)
South Africa. London: The Photographers' Gallery, 1986. ISBN0-907879-07-1. Small exhibition catalogue. (in English)
The Transported of KwaNdebele: A South African Odyssey. With Brenda Goldblatt and Phillip van Niekerk. New York: Aperture Books, 1989. ISBN0-89381-366-4, ISBN0-89381-385-0. (in English)
South Africa: The Structure of Things Then. Cape Town: Oxford University Press 1998. ISBN0-19-571631-0. New York: Monacelli, 1998. ISBN1-58093-026-3. With an essay by Neville Dubow. (in English)
David Goldblatt. Phaidon 55. London: Phaidon, 2001. ISBN0-7148-4051-3. With text by Lesley Lawson. (in English)
David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years. Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001. ISBN84-95273-78-0. (in English)
Particulars. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 2003. ISBN0-620-30659-9. ("Prix du Livre ", XVIe Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Arles 2004)
David Goldblatt – Intersections. Munich: Prestel, 2005. ISBN3-7913-3247-3.
David Goldblatt – Photographs. Rome: Contrasto, 2006. ISBN88-6965-015-4.
David Goldblatt – Some Afrikaners Revisited. With Antjie Krog and Ivor Powell. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007. ISBN1-4152-0025-4 (paper), ISBN1-4152-0026-2 (hard). Revised and augmented ion of Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975).
David Goldblatt: Südafrikanische Fotografien 1952–2006. Winterthur: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2007. ISBN3-85616-294-1. (in German)
Intersections Intersected. Porto: Civilização Editoria; Fundação Serralves, 2008. ISBN972-739-201-6. With text by Ulrich Loock and Ivor Powell. (in English)
Intersecções intersectadas. Porto: Civilização Editoria; Fundação Serralves, 2008. ISBN972-739-200-8, ISBN972-26-2765-1. With text by Ulrich Loock and Ivor Powell. (in Portuguese)
In Boksburg. Books on Books 7. New York: Errata Editions, 2010. ISBN1-935004-12-3. (in English) A reduced-size facsimile of the 1982 book, with an essay by Joanna Lehan.
Kith Kin & Khaya: South African Photographs. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 2010. ISBN0-9869749-0-0, ISBN0-9869749-1-9. (in English) Catalogue of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, 2010, and at the South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, 2010–2011.
TJ / Double Negative: Johannesburg Photographs 1948–2010. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2010. ISBN1-4152-0128-5. Contrasto Due, 2011. ISBN88-6965-218-1. (in English) Two books in a box: TJ is a book of photographs by Goldblatt, Double Negative a novel by Ivan Vladislavić. (Best Photography Book, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards 2011)
TJ / Johannesburg fotografie 1948–2010 / Doppia negazione. With Ivan Vladislavic. Contrasto, 2010. ISBN978-88-6965-262-2. (in Italian)
David Goldblatt, Photographers' References, 2014. ISBN978-2-9543839-1-0(in English). An in depth interview led by Baptiste Lignel.
Regarding Intersections. Göttingen: Steidl, 2014. ISBN978-3869307145. With an essay by Michael Stevenson and an interview by Mark Haworth-Booth. Colour photographs in South Africa made between 2002 and 2011.
Structures of Dominion and Democracy. Göttingen: Steidl, 2018. Edited by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska. ISBN978-3-95829-391-5. A selective retrospective.
An exhibition of Goldblatt's photographs from the collection held by the Victoria and Albert Museum shown alongside group exhibition Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2011.[77]
Appropriated Landscapes: Contemporary African Art from the Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany, 2011–2012.[78]
^Okwui Enwezor. "Matter and consciousness: An insistent gaze from a not disinterested photographer", Fifty-One Years: David Goldblatt (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001), 13–43.
^DescriptionArchived 10 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine (with text by Goldblatt) of photographs related to asbestos and asbestos poisoning, 1999–2007. University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Health Sciences. Retrieved 13 February 2011.