Notes

David Goldblatt’s international reputation was built on his enquiring and clearly observed black-and-white photographs. His first prints to enter the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1978 were colourless scenes of Soweto people. But even at this unheralded point in his career, Goldblatt was photographing in colour. He maintained a strict division between assignment and editorial work, for which he liberally used colour, and his personal documentary photography, which refused colour. This strict distinction was the outcome of both aesthetic and technical considerations. “During those years,” Goldblatt explained in 2005, “colour seemed too sweet a medium to express the anger, disgust and fear that apartheid inspired.”¹

Goldblatt’s work for Leadership magazine in the 1980s, which often featured his colour photos, also gave him practical insight into the limitations of colour analogue photography. They included minimal latitude in post-production, laboratory technicians as collaborators in printing, the use of plastic paper as opposed to fibre paper, and the prohibitive cost of the dye-transfer process in South Africa. “In the late 1990s, I began to use a new generation of colour-negative emulsions that had considerable latitude and a very even-handed palette. When I felt the sweet breath of the end of apartheid and the wish to become somewhat more expansive in my photography, it was natural to put the two together: the new colour emulsions and photographic printing through digital technology on non-plastic papers that I like.”²

The introduction of colour did not change Goldblatt’s personal work, except perhaps to introduce a more concerted focus on landscape. He continued to photograph Johannesburg, a dear subject, with equanimity and intelligence, roaming from its new, far-northern suburbs to its embattled south, where rapidly disappearing mine dumps provided tenuous space for improvised shelter to a proliferating underclass. “If the immense wealth created in the seminal surge of its mining has propelled the city along new and often prosperous trajectories,” Goldblatt wrote of Johannesburg in 2010, “it has failed to conceal or heal the deeply fractured nature of the place.”³ This photo visualizes his opinion.

^1. David Goldblatt (2005) Intersections, Munich: Prestel, page 94.
^2. Ibid, page 95.
^3. David Goldblatt (2010) Kith, Kin & Khaya, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, page 149.

This lot has been selected by Curatorial Voice: Azu Nwagbogu.

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Hayward Gallery, London, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, 10 February to 17 April 2005, another example from the edition exhibited.

Literature

Simon Njami (ed) (2007) Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Johannesburg: Jacana Media, illustrated in colour on page 195.