David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (1930–2018) began working on Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975) in 1963. He had sold his father’s clothing store where he worked, and become a full-time photographer. The ruling Afrikaner National Party—many of its leaders and members had supported the Nazis in the World War II—was firming its grip on the country in the face of black resistance. Yet Goldblatt was drawn not to the events of the time but to “the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” Making these photos he explored his ambivalence toward the Afrikaners he knew from his father’s store. Most, he guessed, were National Party voters, yet he experienced them as “austere, upright, unaffected people of rare generosity of spirit and earthy humor.” Their potency and contradictions moved and disturbed him; their influence pervaded his life. The book includes an essay by famed South African writer Antjie Krog.

The origins of this book lie in David Goldblatt’s (1930–2018) simple observation that many of his fellow South Africans are the victims of often violent crime. And so began Ex Offenders at the Scene of Crime, for which Goldblatt photographed criminal offenders and alleged offenders at the place that was probably life-changing for them and their victims: the scene of the crime or arrest. Each portrait is accompanied by the subject’s written story in his or her own words; for many, a cathartic experience and the first opportunity to recount events without being judged. Goldblatt paid each of his subjects 800 rand for permission to photograph and interview them, and any profit from the project will be donated to the rehabilitation of offenders. Ex Offenders also features Goldblatt’s portraits and interviews of subjects in England, made in collaboration with the community arts project Multistory.

Accompanied by a selection of some of David Goldblatt’s (1930–2018) lesser-known photographs, this distilled dialogue is drawn directly from the recordings of a roving conversation with the photographer conducted three months before his death in June 2018. Goldblatt was born in Randfontein—a mining town on the Witwatersrand gold reef—in 1930, the grandson of Lithuanian-Jewish migrants who settled in South Africa after escaping persecution in Europe. After the death of his father in 1962, Goldblatt sold the family clothing business to become a full-time photographer. In this candid conversation with writer Alexandra Dodd, Goldblatt shares his views about land and landscape, the dangerous lure of repetition in portrait photography, Johannesburg, the solipsism of life as a photographer, staying sharp, his visceral intolerance of censorship, his abiding interest in structures and his observation of instances of dominion under democracy, among other key themes.

This book is a selective retrospective of David Goldblatt (born 1930), a key figure in 20th-century photography. Starting from his earliest photographic series, it shows the foundations of Goldblatt’s critical passion for photography, his social sensitivity and political consciousness. Also presented are his most recent photographs pertaining to the changing situation in his native South Africa. Structures of Dominion and Democracy assembles many of Goldblatt’s influential series, including On the Mines, Some Afrikaners and Structures with some less well-known including Kas Maine, and reconstructs the history of their first publication in the international press. Reproducing original handmade dummies and working plates, the process of bookmaking and other diverse applications of these often iconic images are laid bare. In addition to texts by the photographer, essays by Ivor Powell and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska explore Goldblatt’s work in the context of South African political and cultural history, as well as his contribution to the wider history of photography.