Notes

David Goldblatt was an accomplished photographer of architectural scenes. In the manner of Walker Evans, Goldblatt was attracted to both formal and vernacular architecture. The 1970s saw him actively hone this aspect of his practice through editorial commissions. In 1973, for example, he produced an extraordinary photo essay on the new Carlton Centre in Johannesburg for Optima, a current affairs magazine of the Anglo-American Corporation. Much like the Precisionist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Goldblatt’s architectural work from this time exhibited a keen, even breathless modernist sensibility. This striking photo, with its dramatic vertical lines and determined blocks of white, grey and black, is exemplary.

The photo depicts an area behind the recently closed Newtown Market Building, now the site of Museum Africa and the Market Theatre. Construction had already commenced on the theatre when Goldblatt took this photo. The brilliance of its formal execution aside, the photo raises a question of motive. What exactly is Goldblatt showing? ‘Gradually I came to see structures and their form as expressions of value,’ wrote Goldblatt in 1998, when he became the first South African artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition foregrounded his architectural work. Although not included, this photo possesses the same quietude as the works on the show.² It also underscores a key article of faith for Goldblatt: ‘Our structures often declare quite nakedly, yet eloquently, what manner of people built them, and what they stood for.’³

Take the elevated concrete highway shading the unpeopled scene. Visible through its imposing pier and superstructure, it too was new, having opened in 1967. Architectural historian Clive Chipkin has written how the new road system ‘took an amorphous spread-eagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition.’⁴ It also enabled companies and shopping centres to migrate to Johannesburg’s urban periphery. But, notes Chipkin, all the advantages and betterment of this capital project accrued to the white areas. Black residential areas were not threaded into the city. Remedial action, big and small, is still ongoing. So, Pym Street in the photo now bears the name of jazz saxophonist Gwigwi Mrwebi, and Goch Street was renamed for the Drum journalist Henry Nxumalo.

^1. David Goldblatt (1998) South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, page 10.
^2. Press release (1998) for David Goldblatt: Photographs from South Africa, Museum of Modern Art: New York, 16 July to 6 October: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/217
^3. Goldblatt. Ibid., page 11.
^4. Clive Chipkin (2008) Johannesburg Transition, Johannesburg, STE Publishers, page 174.

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Cape Town.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Stevenson, Cape Town, Juxtapositions: David Goldblatt and Unathi Mkonto, 6 May to 10 June 2003, another edition of the photograph exhibited.

Literature

David Goldblatt (2010) TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948 – 2010, Cape Town, Umuzi, another edition of the photograph illustrated on page 135.