David Goldblatt

Goldblatt's work is held in major museum collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art. 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. Goldblatt has written extensively on architecture and the deeper meaning contained within the buildings we occupy.

Goldblatt began photographing as a teenager. He received his first camera from his father, who had bought it from his other son, who had brought home the damaged German Contax on his return from serving in World War II. Goldblatt 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 early 1990s, and long after, even 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." Instead of producing photographs which might "attempt to pass judgment," Goldblatt chose to "show the complexity of a situation." Depictions of the everyday are frequent in Goldblatt's work. Instead of photographing the explicit violence of Apartheid South Africa, he preferred to document the violence of this era which exhibited itself in ordinary life: "I shun violence. And I wouldn't know how to handle it if I was a photographer in a violent scene." 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." In the 1970s, Goldblatt documented one of the many injustices of the Apartheid South African government in a series of photographs of houses, shops and other types of architecture in the Johannesburg suburb, Pageview. The Group Areas Act of 1950 displaced much of the local population in favor of white South Africans. Goldblatt documented the local population's demonstrations of resistance and determination through their persistent occupation of their homes and businesses—regardless of the damage done. 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.

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.

Goldblatt's work is held in the following permanent public collections: Durban Art Gallery Johannesburg Art Gallery University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg South African National Gallery, Cape Town University of South Africa, Pretoria Constitutional Court, Braamfontein, Johannesburg Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Victoria and Albert Museum, London Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Fonds national d'art contemporain, Paris Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona Photographers' Gallery, London National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Museum of Modern Art, New York San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego Getty Center, Los Angeles Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

1987: Hallmark Fellow at the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), Aspen, Colorado 1992: Gahan Fellow in Photography at Harvard University 1995: Camera Austria Award of the City of Graz for Contemporary Photography 2001: Honorary Doctor in Fine Arts, University of Cape Town 2006: Hasselblad Award – Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography 2007: Honorary Doctor of Literature, University of the Witwatersrand 2007: Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society 2009: HCB Award, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation 2010: Lucie Award, Lifetime Achievement Award, Lucie Foundation 2011: Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) (awarded, but declined by Goldblatt in protest over the Protection of State Information Bill) 2011: Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts San Francisco Art Institute 2013: Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award for Lifetime Achievement, International Center of Photography, New York City