Photographer · South Africa
David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt (1930–2018) was a South African photographer who spent six decades recording how apartheid was built into his country's landscape, buildings and daily routines. His books — On the Mines, Some Afrikaners Photographed, In Boksburg, The Transported of KwaNdebele — are classics of documentary photography. In 1989 he founded the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, which trained a generation of photographers.
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A quiet, patient witness
David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, a gold-mining town west of Johannesburg, the third son of Eli Goldblatt and Olga Light, whose families had come to South Africa from Lithuania in the 1890s to escape the persecution of Jewish communities there. The family business was a men's wear shop. Goldblatt studied for a commerce degree, ran the shop and photographed in his spare time; he sold it after his father's death in 1962 and turned to photography full time.
Unlike the press photographers of his generation, Goldblatt rarely photographed violence. He was interested in the structures that made it possible: the laws, the buildings, the routines and the values of ordinary people. He photographed slowly, usually in black and white, often with a large camera, and wrote detailed captions that are part of the work.
How to look at a Goldblatt: read the caption as well as the picture, since the caption supplies the place, the date and often the name that the frame leaves out. Then look for what is ordinary: a house, a bench, a mine dump, a figure standing with a tool. His subject is what apartheid looked like when it was not an event, and the pictures work by patient accumulation rather than by a single decisive moment. That reading of his method is this site's own.
The books
On the Mines (1973), made with the writer Nadine Gordimer, looked at the gold mines on which South Africa's wealth was built and the men who worked in them. Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975) portrayed the community that ran the apartheid state, without caricature. In Boksburg (1982) studied a white middle-class town in minute detail. The Transported of KwaNdebele (1989) followed Black commuters who spent up to eight hours a day on buses between the "homeland" where they were forced to live and their jobs near Pretoria.
Later projects turned to the buildings and monuments of South Africa, and, after 1994, to the democratic country's unfinished business: land, crime and inequality.
The Market Photo Workshop
In 1989 Goldblatt raised funds, together with friends, to found the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, to teach visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with a particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid. The workshop became one of the most important photography schools in Africa, and its former students include Zanele Muholi. Sources vary between "Market Photo Workshop" and "Market Photography Workshop" for the name.
Recognition
The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a solo exhibition in 1998, which concentrated on his architectural work and showed how he read a society through its buildings and landscapes. The Hasselblad Foundation gave him its international award in photography in 2006, citing his lifelong portrayal of the social and political life of his country and praising his historical and political perception, which it said conveys the texture of daily life under apartheid. He received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award in 2009. He died in Johannesburg in 2018.
The archive and the retrospective
Goldblatt's archive, including prints, negatives, transparencies and correspondence, is held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The retrospective David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago and also shown at MAPFRE in Madrid, brought together about 150 works from the two museums' collections.
Where to see the work
The Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago hold the works shown in that retrospective, and the Beinecke Library holds the archive; ask each which pieces are on view and what can be consulted. In Johannesburg, the Market Photo Workshop that Goldblatt founded is the place to ask about current teaching and exhibitions. The books named above are the most complete way to see the projects, because he conceived each as a sequence.
See also
Goldblatt's work sits alongside that of Ernest Cole and Peter Magubane. Read African photography and see our list of South African photographers. For a different way of looking at white South Africa, see Roger Ballen.
