Giant of SA photography used his lens with precision and compassion

Born in the West Rand mining town of Randfontein in November 1930, David Goldblatt was the son of Jewish shopkeepers who, as children, had fled anti-Semitism in Lithuania.

During his own childhood, he could not avoid regularly seeing a very South African manifestation of racism, “There was a clear view from the back of our house to the police station. Every morning one would see a group of African people in the yard of the police station… handcuffed together in rows and they would be marched through the town to the magistrate's court at the other end of the town. And I can still remember my feelings of outrage at the injustice of this, of the indignity that these people were made to suffer.”

In other ways, growing up in Randfontein was idyllic and he recalled fond memories, some of which he had captured to film. Some early surviving prints of his school friends, taken on a simple medium format camera, possibly a Box Brownie but likely something that was easier to look through, show an awareness of the moment and of composition.

One standout is a close up of a schoolmate’s head as he sleeps on another’s lap during a school outing on a train.

David began to take photography seriously in 1948, the year the National Party came to power. His elder brother had served in the merchant navy and returned with a 35mm camera. That Contax rangefinder was one of the pioneers of the miniaturisation of cameras and had swept through photography like a veldfire. Like so many of that generation, Goldblatt took to these supremely portable cameras; they were quick to operate and discrete, almost like an extension of the eye. Looking at some of the images from that period transport us instantly to the world of a small mining town.

He wanted to be a photojournalist in the tradition of the Life magazine photographers, but marriage to Lily and his father’s illness forced him to take over the family business – a men’s outfitters in Randfontein. He was studying part-time at Wits and would credit an economics lecturer with instilling in him the intellectual rigour he would apply throughout his life.

After his father’s death, he sold the store to work full time as a professional photographer.

In 1966 and 1967 he travelled quite extensively through the country working on his essay on Afrikaners. He had a Peugeot 403, a pup tent, a sleeping bag and a small primus stove. “Mostly I camped at the side of the road and on farms, often without the tent,” Goldblatt recounted, “I only did it for about two to three weeks at a stretch, so it wasn’t too bad.” That ascetic approach has been a constant to his work; discomfort would never distract him.

Goldblatt was one of South Africa’s best known photographic chroniclers. For seven decades, he explored a series of critical explorations of South African society. He is one of our country's major artistic figures, someone who has captured time and space in images that are burnt onto the collective consciousness. “I was concerned to put down on film some of the things that to me were indicative of the values, of the ethos, that prevailed in our society. I was not satisfied with what I did, I knew that there were much deeper levels to which I should have penetrated somehow, but I did not know how.”

David and Lily Goldblatt, Karoo, May 31, 2004. Photo © Greg Marinovich/(@GregMarinovich)

“I was interested in the underbelly of the society, in its values and how they came to be formed and in particular, how they came to be expressed. How do we come to the values we hold and how do we express these values? These to me are the vital questions.”

Thirty years later, on a return visit to some of the people he had photographed, Goldblatt was painfully self-aware of his own shortcomings within the South African environment, and of never having learnt an African language, “if people accused my pictures of African people of lacking intimacy, I would understand where that came from.”

“It involved me in open conflict sometimes with people whom I respected very highly and with whose political views I agreed. But I differed strongly over the use they made of photographs. I knew that my engagement was there, but that it differed from a lot of other people. It certainly wasn’t comfortable sometimes to have that difference. I was sometimes quite lonely.”

Said Mofokeng, “David’s work is much more intellectual, it is not visceral. What he actually does is not in your face.”

“Apartheid was the overwhelming present system within which we lived. I tried to see people within that for what they were. I was much more interested in the underbelly, in what life was like to be black. And eventually what life was like to be white. I looked at both of these things, or I attempted to.”

All through those years, Goldblatt did commercial and editorial photography to subsidise his real work. His relationship with Anglo American also gave him access to the mines which would lead to the 1973 book On The Mines. He was also the photo editor on Leadership magazine, which allowed him to assign talented young photographers.

It is an austere rendering of photography, often of landscapes and urban-scapes that do not, at first sight, seem compelling.

“Landscape is a very difficult subject for photography, largely because of scale. It does not easily reduce to a little rectangular paper. You need to become peculiarly aware of how the landscape works, or how the land works. I don’t like the term landscape because that implies already that you’ve brought a certain kind of order to it. The whole problem of photographing the land is to find a way of doing it that conveys a certain visual order but which at the same time doesn’t look like you have organised it.”

As he dug deeper into his sub-conscious and into the country’s psyche, he found himself choosing colour, shooting large format negatives and then having them scanned and printed to his exacting standards. This sometimes led to a muting of the vivid tendencies of colour film into something subtler. Later, he would use a digital medium format for some of his work.

While doing this, already a man in his seventies, he received the Hasselblad award and discovered that the foundation had a set of the late Ernst Cole’s images. Many of these had formed the basis for House of Bondage published in 1967 when Cole was in exile from his native South Africa, but these original printed were uncropped, closer representations of the original negatives. This led to a retrospective exhibition and book, Ernst Cole Photographer (2010).

Politically, Goldblatt was often a lightning rod. He was an anti-racist white liberal when that was almost (but not quite) a radical position, yet as black politics came to the forefront of public consciousness, he was asked to become more politically involved and to use his work as a direct voice.

He refused, not because he was opposed to the politics, to the contrary, he agreed with the politics. He did not want his work to be, or be used as, propaganda, even for caused he agreed with.

More controversially, Goldblatt decided to remove the collection he had donated to the University of Cape Town because he felt the rights and freedoms of artists were no longer protect by the university in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall campaigns that saw artworks destroyed and work censored by student activist groups. The collection moved to Yale University in the US.

The massive achievements of Goldblatt would suggest a driven, singular man, yet he was generous, warm and down to earth, with a keen sense of self-deprecating humour. As so many of the tributes to him would suggest, he is truly irreplaceable. DM

Sources:

David Goldblatt has died (Mail & Guardian)

Conversations with Goldblatt (Vimeo)

Media Storm

ASX

SFMOMA