Notes

David Goldblatt is well known for his austere yet empathetic black-and-white photographs of people and places in apartheid South Africa. Technological advances with colour negative emulsions in the late 1990s prompted Goldblatt to use colour in his new post-apartheid work. In the early 2000s, Goldblatt initiated a project to photograph the intersection of every latitude and longitude line in South Africa. He abandoned the project, in part due to the visual paucity of the rural landscapes he encountered, but also because of the programmatic way of seeing it imposed. He nonetheless continued to explore and document the landscapes of the Karoo. This photograph, first exhibited at Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, in October 2003, visually animates an insight he gained during his solitary travels through the Karoo's apparent nothings: "It is deep, bland, vast and seemingly featureless. Yet precisely in these qualities is a presence that is difficult to hold or suggest in photographs."¹

¹ Michael Stevenson, 'Markers of Presence', in David Goldblatt, Intersections, Munich: Prestel, 2005, page 105.