David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt HonFRPS (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." He has numerous publications to his name.
Early life.
Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province, 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.
Goldblatt's father ran a clothing store, where his mother worked as a typist for a clothing company, which Goldblatt speculated may have been how they met. Goldblatt attended Krugersdorp High School, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a degree in commerce.
Photography.
Goldblatt began photographing when he was a teenager. He got his first camera from his father, who bought it from Goldblatt's brother, who had brought home a damaged German Contax camera when he came back from serving in World War II. Though his first photographs were not groundbreaking, he enlisted help from a wedding photographer: "He would drape several cameras around my neck so that I looked very professional, and my job was to ensure that no guest with a good camera got a good picture . . . I would have to bump or walk in front of them at the critical moment so that my boss was the only person who ended up with good photographs.” A couple years later in 1963, as his skill developed, he sold the clothing shop that he had taken over on the death of his father in 1962, and became a full-time photographer. He documented developments in South Africa through the period of apartheid until it ended in the 1990s. However he was still making photographs up until his death in 2018.
Throughout his years as a photographer, Goldblatt never saw himself as an artist, and he was uncomfortable being seen as one. Many agree that he was a documentarian more than he was an artist. Goldblatt had an innovative approach to documentary photography. He made a life of photographing the issues that went beyond the events of apartheid and documented the conditions that led to them. Goldblatt was never comfortable with the fine art world. He went to exhibition openings but secretly hated the attention they threw upon him. He got around the label of artist by simply calling himself a photographer. He said: "I am a self-appointed observer and critic of the society into which I was born, with a tendency to giving recognition to what is overlooked or unseen."
Goldblatt's photography was not obviously politically charged. He claimed he was not an activist, unlike the majority of his friends and other photographers during this time. He in turn was looked down upon and disrespected for not involving himself in activism, on which he commented: "I wasn't prepared to compromise what I regarded as my particular needs."
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 had not changed that much for workers by 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. . . . It will take generations to undo the consequences of Apartheid."
After apartheid, Goldblatt continued to photograph within South Africa, particularly its landscapes.
In the work Goldblatt created during apartheid he never photographed in colour. Goldblatt observed that: "the use of colour during apartheid would have been inappropriate. It would have enhanced the beautiful and the personal, whereas black and white photographs to more effectively documented the external dramatic contradictions that defined this earlier period." In the 1990s he began working in colour, in a sense adapting to the digital age. "I’ve found the venture into color quite exciting . . . largely because new technology has enabled me to work with color on the computer as I have done with black and white in the darkroom." 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."
This was coupled with new developments in 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 extensively.
Collections and publications.
Goldblatt's work is held in major museum collections worldwide.
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.
Influences.
Goldblatt was inspired by photography in magazines such as "Life", "Look" and "Picture Post", which helped him with things such as captioning his photographs. Goldblatt also cited writers and visual artists as his major influences, among them Jillian Becker, Guy Tillim, Herman Charles Bosman, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, Ivan Vladislavic and playwright Barney Simon.
Herman Charles Bosman specifically helped inspire Goldblatt in his second photo essay titled "The South African Tatler".
Goldblatt helped influence the work of the photographer Santu Mofokeng as they studied together during the time of apartheid. Together they helped reinvent documentary and conceptual modes of photography, which led them to prominence and influence within documentary photography.
Later life.
After founding the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 1989, Goldblatt turned no photographer, struggling or famous away from his door. He was always accessible to everyone no matter what, even in his later life.
Goldblatt died on 25 June 2018 in Johannesburg from cancer. He had created photographs up until his death. He was survived by his wife, Lily Goldblatt and his children Steven, Brenda and Ronnie; and two grandchildren.
Collections.
Goldblatt's work is held in the following permanent public collections: