David Goldblatt at AXA - Brief Article

This retrospective of works dated 1948 to 1999 is our widest exposure yet to David Goldblatt, a great ascetic of modern documentary photography. Some 154 medium-size, black-and-white prints (up to 18 by 20 inches) were hung in thematic groups that corresponded to Goldblatt's books. His very recent color work was not included in the show.

Goldblatt was born in 1930 in a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa, to Jewish shopkeepers who had fled Lithuanian pogroms with their parents in the 1890s. Alienated as a young adult from Afrikaner racism, he nevertheless devoted himself to making the gimmick-free portraits collected in Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975).

Many of Goldblatt's photographs of people are taken with the subject's consent. Sometimes one misses the contingent animation of the candid, but the pictorial stiffness also reveals Kafkaesque angst and Arbus-like ironies. His portraits of Soweto and Transkei's "coloured" residents in Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986) are no less drab or strange. In restricted areas at the height of anti-apartheid violence, Goldblatt coped by working methodically, shooting only from a tripod, intentions announced. A book of tightly composed details, Particulars (1975), brings graphic force to everyday sordidness.

In The Transported of Kwa-Ndebele (1989), he photographed people in dark, moving buses on long commutes from enforced "homelands." Goldblatt is undeterred by near-impossible shooting conditions that would seem to hold little prospect for heroic drama. Indeed, he resisted calls from the ANC's cultural council to provide heroic images of black struggle and from the government Department of Information to document the "real" (i.e. whitewashed) story.

Goldblatt's landscape and architecture work, collected in South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (1998), allows one grand vista, but only to show how it has been appropriated by, as Goldblatt's descriptive title says, "speculative development in supposedly `authentic Cape Dutch' style." He catalogues the "will to power" of whites' grandiose monuments and churches, and the uprooted cruelties of "coloured" resettlements. Around 1977 he documented Indian homes and shops in Fietas, then their destruction under the Group Areas Act, and still later the roadside banalities that have replaced them.

At first glance, many of these photographs appear unremarkable. As one absorbs their accumulated details, though, Goldblatt's avoidance of stylistic flash becomes a high point, not only for 20th-century documentary but also for individually felt moral unease.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group