Born in Randfontein, South Africa in 1930, David Goldblatt has been documenting the changing political landscape of his country for more than five decades. … (read more)

Born in Randfontein, South Africa in 1930, David Goldblatt has been documenting the changing political landscape of his country for more than five decades.

His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, Goldblatt was forced into a peculiar situation, being at once a white man in a racially segregated society and a member of a religious minority with a sense of otherness.

He used the camera to capture the true face of apartheid as his way of coping with horrifying realities and making his voice heard. Goldblatt did not try to capture iconic images, nor did he use the camera as a tool to entice revolution through propaganda. Instead, he reveals a much more complex portrait, including the intricacies and banalities of daily life in all aspects of society. Whether showing the plight of black communities, the culture of the Afrikaner nationalists, the comfort of white suburbanites, or the architectural landscape, Goldblatt’s photographs are an intimate portrayal of a culture plagued by injustice.

His photographic essay South Africa: the Structure of Things Then was made into a monograph and also shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998. Goldblatt’s work was included in Documenta 11 in 2002, Documenta 12 in 2007, and the traveling mega-exhibition Africa Remix (2004–07). His limited edition book, Particulars, won the award for the best photography book at the Rencontres d’Arles festival, France, in 2004 and in 2006, Goldblatt won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.

Courtesy of the New Museum, condensed and adapted

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