David Goldblatt
When Goldblatt first published his photographic essay on Afrikaners in 1968, a national newspaper ran an article on the front page with the title Bloed sal kook oor dié fotos (Blood will boil over these photographs). The point of contention was curious: that a man would dare photograph a farmer in a sweat-stained hat and another unshaven. This, Goldblatt said, was the principal sin, the undermining of the nationalist vision of ordentlike people, a word which finds no easy translation in English and rests somewhere between proper, decent and respectable. No doubt this photograph, Picnic at Hartebeespoort Dam, would have similarly set the blood boiling. A woman’s shoe lies in the foreground, the blankets are crumpled and marked with grass, and a child sleeps in only his swimming shorts. Sitting beside the cardboard box that serves as picnic basket, an older boy dispatches his infant sibling with a toy gun.
This photograph appears in Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975; Fifty-one Years, 2001; Some Afrikaners Revisited, 2007; Kith Kin & Khaya, 2011; Structures of Dominion and Democracy, 2018; and On Common Ground, 2018.
b.1930, Randfontein; d.2018, Johannesburg
“I was drawn,” the late photographer David Goldblatt wrote, “not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” A preeminent chronicler of South African life under apartheid and after, Goldblatt bore witness to how this life is written on the land, in its structures or their absence. Unconcerned with documenting significant historic moments, his photographs stand outside the events of the time and yet are eloquent of them. Through Goldblatt’s lens, the prosaic reveals a telling poignancy. Even in those images that appear benign, much is latent in them – histories and politics, desires and dread. His photographs are quietly critical reflections on the values and conditions that have shaped the country; those structures both ideological and tangible. Among his most notable photobooks are On the Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), In Boksburg (1982), The Structure of Things Then (1998), and Particulars (2003).
