Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall, Boksburg. 1980
David Goldblatt
Artwork 1980
David Goldblatt's black-and-white photograph 'Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall, Boksburg. 1980' shows a young boy positioned in the centre of the frame, standing in a boxing ring. There is a man standing on either side of him.
Artwork: David Goldblatt, Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall, Boksburg. 1980 (1980). Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper. 29 x 41 cm. Private collection.
Artist David Goldblatt Title Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall, Boksburg. 1980 Date 1980 Materials Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper Dimensions 29 x 41 cm Edition Edition of 10 Credit Private collection

Before the fight was first published in Goldblatt’s In Boksburg (1982), a photographic study in legislative whiteness. It took as subject the Transvaal town of Boksburg, a community from which people of colour were entirely excluded – unless they had a passbook allowing them to work or were invited as guests of the town (few were). “In fact, of course,” Goldblatt reflects, “the black presence was everywhere – they worked the mines, they cleaned the houses, they kept the white children. They were everywhere. But they were not part of the town.”

This photograph is also included in Fifty-one Years, 2001; Kith Kin & Khaya, 2011; and In Boksburg (second edition), 2015.

“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).

Process photograph from the ‘Picture Theory’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery. Hands wearing archive gloves hold a printed copy of David Goldblatt’s photograph ‘Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall, Boksburg’. In the middle, a young boy stands in a the corner of a boxing ring. On the left, a man stands in attendance outside the ring.
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