AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	33. Visualizing Africa, from there to here, between now and then.
Paper ID	374
Author(s)	Leenaerts, Danielle Francoise
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in South Africa, the son of Lithuanian-Jewish parents who had fled, as children, Europe and the pogroms in the 1890s. His personal story probably encouraged what he calls a ”concern with values”, that he sees as the most persistent thread in his photographic work, dealing with the (r)evolution of South African society. From 1962 on, Goldblatt has photographed South African reality, following three principal axes: architecture; landscape and portraiture. Rather than a dramatic approach of the apartheid regime, Goldblatt chose to reveal it through the everyday, the “quiet and the commonplace, where nothing happened and yet, all was contained and immanent”. His photographic series bear witness of this method: segregated mining workers (1973); Afrikaners in their farms (1975); life in the white community of small Boksburg (1979-1980); resettlement communities photographed during the 1980. These images reveal how deeply the apartheid ideology has shaped not only the landscape, but also the mentalities. Structural correspondences appear between photographic constructs and landscape or architectural structuring. In Golblatt’s opinion, apartheid is only the continuation of colonial regime, as the photographer calls the period from 1652 to 1990 the era of “Baasskap”, the Afrikaans word for master ship, of white domination. Focusing on tenuous details rather than tumultuous crisis, on human conditions rather than events, David Goldblatt gives a personal, unique narrative of South Africa’s recent past and actuality, providing a piece of information eluded by most media. Dialogue between form and content also appears in Goldblatt’s recent colour work, begun at the end of the 1990s. Colour symbolically marks the transition of South Africa’s towards post-independence era. But this move from black and white to colour continues to serve Goldblatt’s visual expression of underlying social structures, as his photographs of Johannesburg streets show. This turning point also corresponds to the blossoming of his international career, launched by the 1998 Museum of Modern Art exhibition (“South Africa: the Structure of Things then"), followed in 2001 by a retrospective exhibition produced by the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Axa Gallery in New York ("David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years"), travelling for four years around Europe before it was shown in Johannesburg. Let us also mention his participation in group shows as Documenta XI (2002) and “Africa Remix” (2004 to 2006). His last exhibition, commissioned by Martin Parr for the last “Rencontres photographiques d’Arles”, was granted by Michel Guerrin, journalist at “Le Monde”, to be the best among the 30 exhibitions presented during the festival. Goldblatt’s career seems to be emblematic of the international recognition of African contemporary art. It appears that the questions African art addresses today, but also the channels through which it expresses them, open to a new visual and cultural geography. Goldblatt’s approach to photography, as much as the historical content of his work, give a very elaborate example of the value of this well-understood artistic globalization.

David Goldblatt's visualization of South Africa: an emblematic photographic account of a local but symbolic history