“Goldbatt’s way was always to go deeper, to find an oblique angle that went right to the heart of the matter: an image bespeaking loneliness, stunted aspiration, fragile pride on both sides of the racial divide, not infrequently with an intimation of imminent violence, or its result.”- Joseph Lelyveld, the New York Review of Books
David Goldblatt is one of South Africa’s most highly recognized photographers and his work is a valued South African cultural export. Growing up before the rumbles of apartheid, Goldblatt felt compelled to document and witness the social upheaval and civic organization that was implemented through the course of his young adulthood. As a Jew, Goldblatt didn’t fit into the clear divide of black and white—he was still something different or “less than.” His Jewish identity, though not viewed as intrinsic to his work when viewed in the world press, is essentially allied with his approach to photography. The Anti-Semitism that he often was subjected to made him sensitive to the humiliation and degradation suffered by other groups in South Africa’s human landscape.
South African Photographs: David Goldblatt, the current Goldblatt retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York, surveys Goldblatt’s brilliant, nuanced, and sympathetic career behind the lens. His photographs do not rely on common imagery of riots, violence, or segregated public space. Instead, they focus on the microcosms of community and the small instances in which everything collides or tension is made visible. He has a marked talent for finding the signal of a struggle in a portrait of daily life.
In this exhibition of 150 black and white photographs, each image is annotated in precise and illuminating detail in the artist’s captions. Like Diane Arbus, Goldblatt has the rare ability to tell a life story through the combined means of an image and a few words. Recurring themes in his work include the lives of Afrikaners; daily rituals and the community of Boksburg, a small white community in Johannesburg; the makeshift puppet states or Bantustans in which many black South Africans were forced to live; the lives of black miners; and the physical landscape of Johannesburg.
The most interesting photographs are those in which both segments of the population come together in surprising ways. One of the more memorable photographs is titled The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, on the farm in Heimweeberg, near Nietverdiend in the Marico Bushveld. Transvaal (North-West Province), 1964. In the photograph, a young Afrikaner boy stands behind his sitting nursemaid, a black teenage girl. He touches her intimately, his fingers lingering on the gap between her sleeveless shirt and her bare shoulders. And the gesture is so casual—the two are clearly physically very close. But although their relationship is appropriate and accepted, it is clear that as he grows older, they will inevitably be torn apart. It just wouldn’t be appropriate for them to be together if he was not a child.
Another memorable image is Holdup in Hillbrow (Johannesburg, 1963). A young blonde boy has snuck up behind a black man in a suit. The boy is playfully aiming a toy pistol at the man’s back. The gesture is loaded and provocative: although at age four or five the boy is only playing, the game hints at the potential for a more violent end. If the boy were only a bit older, this would not be a game: this would be the terrifying violence of apartheid.
The photo Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall. 1979/80 is also a poignant one. A terrified little boy is standing still in the corner of a boxing ring. He is wearing boxing gloves, but he is perfectly still—overpowered by fear. He is given the tools to fight and expected to rage, and perhaps this is analogous to the situation of many white children who lived in apartheid South Africa—they were given the gloves and expected to fight, despite the fact that they were merely children.
Through Goldblatt’s lens, we are invited to look at the realities of South Africa in a non-judgmental way. He does not form his viewers opinions, he does not proselytize. For Goldblatt, it is just as important to share the truths of his home country as it is to explore the life and values of its citizens. In images of crumbling black states, middle-class white social clubs, and everything in between, he is able to dissect the gestures which cohesively form one of the most complex modern countries in the world.
South African Photographs: David Goldblatt is on view at the Jewish Museum through September 19, 2010. The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York NY 10128. http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/
