After David Goldblatt

South African photographer David Goldblatt died end of June in his home town Johannesburg. His work was internationally acclaimed for portraying not apartheid itself, but the actual conditions and structures behind it. His deep influence over an entire generation of photographers in South Africa and beyond is only one aspect of the legacy he leaves behind. Photography historian Sophie Feyder recalls her encounters with him.

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Monday afternoon, 25th of June 2018, my friend Annie texts me: ‘David Goldblatt just died’. I stare at my phone in disbelief and gasp. The impossible had just happened. Of course David was old. But he was David Goldblatt. One of the best, the most integral photographers in the world. I write back to Annie: ‘It’s like God just died’. ‘I know. I feel the same’, she replies.

I remember the first time I saw some of his images, back when I was first trying my hand at documentary photography. It was the series called The Transported of Kwandebele (1989), which documented the incredibly long and dreary journey black South African mine workers had to do daily to get from their houses in the segregated homelands to the mines — and back. The miners would leave the house as early as 3 am and get home at 8, sometimes 10 pm, only to get up a few hours later.

Goldblatt’s work was the perfect meeting point I was searching for between an earnest interest in ‘politics’ and a deep sense of aesthetics.

Goldblatt takes us on their bus ride, his photographs showing tired bodies under dim light, attempting somehow to find the comfort of sleep despite the jerkiness of the ride. These pictures both humanised these miners, while providing a powerful understanding of the bigger picture, how apartheid and its oppressive Pass Laws concretely affected people’s lives.

A Turning Point

After that, I began visiting libraries throughout my city, hungrily trying to get my hands on his books. His monumental publication The Structures of Things Then (1998) just blew my mind. The subject of the book is nothing less than the structures of apartheid, trying to understand an entire racist system from the perspective of infrastructure and landscape. How does white supremacy manifest itself in terms of architecture and urban planning? Does a violent history of land dispossession leave traces in the landscape?

For me, Goldblatt’s work was the perfect meeting point I was searching for between an earnest interest in ‘politics’ and a deep sense of aesthetics. I could stare at his photos for hours, relishing the incredible range of greys, the particular temporality of his images that reflected the slow pace of working with a large-format camera. This was the polar opposite of photojournalism — capturing the immediate and the very urgent. His was the time of careful analysis. And back then, just as I was living the turmoil of the digital revolution in the photography world, his work felt like a life-saver, something to cling onto.

Discovering his work marked a turning point in my life. I ended up spending a lot of time in Johannesburg, doing research on black popular photography for my PhD. When academics ask me why I choose to work on South Africa, I usually give an elaborate ideological answer. The truth was that I simply wanted to meet David.

And I did.

Loyal to his people

I wrote to him, waving my research project as an excuse. To my surprise, he wrote back the next day, even giving me his cellphone number to make an appointment. I met him at his house, in a white middle-class residential area adjacent the city centre of Johannesburg. He lived in a gated community, but it was nevertheless a far cry from the villas in ‘leafy suburbs’ further up north towards Sandton, where many white people ran away to after the end of apartheid. Till the end, he stayed in the same modest house, despite the many burglaries him and his wife Lilly went through.

Loyalty is perhaps one feature that best defines him. Loyalty to his city, to his country, to his people. In his 60 years of photographic career, he almost exclusively focused on South African society. I remember him saying that he just wasn’t interested in photographing anywhere else. He didn’t feel like he knew any other social reality well enough to make any sense of it.

Loyalty is perhaps one feature that best defines him. Loyalty to his city, to his country, to his people.

We had our interview in his office, which was filled as one would expect with photography and art books, rows of files and paper piles — as well as a safe deposit containing original prints and negatives. ‘My pension scheme’, he chuckled, nodding in its direction. Our conversation revolved around the question why it took so much time for the first black photographers to emerge in South Africa, fifty years after the first black-run studios appeared in the 1870s in West Africa. He spoke in a slow and concise way, with much gravitas, going straight to the point.

We got to meet several times after that, including in Amsterdam for the occasion of an opening of his exhibition at Huis Marseille, where he included me at the diner given in his honour. His generosity towards me was not atypical. His commitment to help young photographers led him to the idea of creating a school whose goal was to cater for aspiring black photographers of disenfranchised background.

All about the work

The idea took many years to execute, but in 1989 the Market Photo Workshop was founded. Most of the renowned South African photographers of the newer generation have attended this school at one point in their career. As far as I know, it is still the only photography school in the African continent that provides scholarships and bursaries.

This is perhaps what I most admired about him. His no-nonsense way of living photography. His total disinterest in the mundane dynamics of fame and status. The profound sense of purpose with which he did things. It was all about the work for him, not about his own persona. Even as the prizes, solo exhibitions and retrospectives in prestigious museums began raining in, from the Moma in 1998, to the Centre Pompidou in 2018— he remained the same.

He invariably wore the same outfit, whether for a vernissage or a photo shoot. His wardrobe, it seemed, consisted entirely of plain T-shirts in monotone colours and ‘outdoors’ type of trousers. I never saw him without his photo vest and its many pockets.

Perhaps this sober way of being is a generational thing, him having been born in 1930 from jewish parents who had fled Lithuania as children. Or perhaps it had more to do with the fact that international fame came rather late in his career. By the time world-wide recognition started picking up in the 1990s, Goldblatt had already been photographing for nearly forty years and had long been acclaimed in his own country.

Before the glitz and the sparkles, Goldblatt’s steady dedication to photography came alongside many unglamorous obligations — that of running his father’s tailor shop after his father got ill, and then later when he became a full-time professional photographer, the task of supporting his family at a time where photographers were rarely included in the art world. His income relied on commissions from various companies, including the Anglo-American mining company.

Not a ‘joiner’

The London office of the ANC gave him grief for this, calling to boycott his exhibition that was touring in Britain in 1985. Goldblatt was probably too hard for the ANC to place. While he clearly had left-leaning sympathies and embraced liberal values, he never called himself a ‘joiner’. He refused to let his photographs be used for any propaganda purposes or be affiliated to any political party.

Nothing is ‘happening’ in these pictures; Goldblatt scrutinises instead quiet, orderly life, the mundane banality of white middle-class suburban bubble.

Unlike his peers from Afrapix (a progressive photo agency that included black photographers), he didn’t see photography ‘as a weapon’ to serve the struggle. His mission as a photographer was to dig deeper, to go beyond the surface of things. To quote Goldblatt: ‘I was very interested in the events that were taking place in the country as a citizen but, as a photographer, I’m not particularly interested, and I wasn’t then, in photographing the moment that something happens. I’m interested in the conditions that give rise to events.’

His collaboration with Anglo-American gave him complete access to the mining operations. Over the years, he used that privileged access to photograph the appalling working conditions of miners but also much more — the various expressions of hierarchy, the apparatus of surveillance, the peculiar semi-lights and cold textures of mine compounds, the logistics behind the humongous scale of operations, the irony of having miners spend a big chunk of their salary at the mine’s shop… I’m talking of course of his now famous publication On the Mines (1973), to which Nobel-prize winner Nadine Gordimer contributed with her writing.

The quiet type of violence

It is easy to applaud Goldblatt for his wise long-term vision now that his work is so celebrated. But it was less easy for him to defend his position back then, in a political context where there was such urgency to defeat the apartheid regime. His photojournalist colleagues would take great risks to capture scenes of police brutality and collective grief.

Meanwhile, Goldblatt was photographing white middle-class Afrikaners in their clean living room and manicured lawns (In Boksburg, 1982). Nothing is ‘happening’ in these pictures; Goldblatt scrutinises instead quiet, orderly life, the mundane banality of white middle-class suburban bubble. It was hard for his peers to understand what he was trying to do: dissect the psyche of white rule, pinpoint the values upholding it, as expressed through everyday practices, home interiors and church buildings.

Goldblatt steered away from the spectacle of violence. He was more interested in the quiet type of violence — the violence that surrounds us in our daily life, the one that remains even after the clashes have died out and all observers have left the scene.

Take for instance his photos of Indian families from Fietas, on the brink of being forcefully removed under the Group Areas Act. One photo shows a bedroom just large enough to fit two beds pushed together. The caption explains that the family had had to trim their originally king-sized bed to make it fit their smaller room in their new house in the Indian Group Area where they were relocated. The violence of social descent, contained in one humble detail.

The complexities of ordinary life

Goldblatt’s particular angle of approach resonated with writer and literary critic Njabulo Ndebele’s virulent criticism of ‘protest literature’ (Rediscovery of the Ordinary, 1984). Ndebele basically argued that South African literature had become exclusively concerned with denouncing the overwhelming injustice inherent to the apartheid system. Stories were written on the premise that ‘everything must make a spectacular political statement’, with little attention to nuances and details.

Goldblatt’s interest for the people he photographed was genuine, stemming out of deep empathy for human kind.

The underlying assumption in protest literature is that certain aspects of life are more relevant than others, namely those that offer an obvious political insight. Ndebele thus called for a broadening of literature, for writing stories that related more to the ordinary, here defined as the opposite of the spectacular.

And this is essentially what Goldblatt did, to focus on the details and nuances of the complex social dynamics in his country. There is one photo that comes to my mind here, that of a black nanny and the white boy she was taking care of, standing behind her, with his hands resting on her shoulders. The punctum of the image for me is the nanny’s hand wrapped around his heel. This gesture of such proximity and affection speaks volumes of the ambivalence of race relationships in South Africa, where white kids were lovingly raised by black nannies but would eventually vote for the National Party as adults.

More captions, please…

Goldblatt taught me the importance of captions. He is known for resorting to biblically long captions if he felt it was necessary to tell the story. His captions were important to him, not just to provide the historical context, but also to be fair to his photographic subjects. When asked whether he regretted any one of his pictures, he evoked one of his most famous images, that of three Afrikaners riding white horses one next to each other, in a tight row facing the camera (from the book Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975). He felt that that picture did not do them justice, that it was too much of a caricature.

This sense of ethics is also something that will stay with me. So many photographers are only concerned about producing the most effective kind of picture, no matter at what cost. Goldblatt’s interest for the people he photographed — be it criminals, hawkers, scouts, bureaucrats, prostitutes, pedestrians, farmers, housewives or miners — was genuine, stemming out of deep empathy for human kind. All his portraits are carefully composed, the subject meeting the photographer’s gaze as an equal, in full collaboration.

My one regret is not having been able to give him a copy of my book Commonplace with Tamsyn Adams (Fourthwall Books, 2016). The book is about how seemingly banal family pictures from a white and a black family can nevertheless give a more nuanced perception of history. I wanted him to see the book, to show him to what extent he has influenced my way of understanding history, photography and much more — I wanted to thank him for that. I don’t know what he would have thought of the book, but I’m pretty sure he’d have said at least one thing. ‘Not enough captions.’