David Goldblatt
Goldblatt’s At a meeting of the Voortrekkers shows a local gathering of the nationalist Afrikaner youth organisation. Part Boy Scouts, part Hitlerjugend, the Voortrekker movement espoused the virtues of Afrikaans culture, citizenship and Calvinist Christianity – virtues which, at the time, justified and affirmed white domination over the country’s black majority. Yet, like all the photographs included in In Boksburg (1982), Goldblatt offers no moral judgement of his subject, only a reflection of life in the town. “At best,” he said, “I suppose I hoped that we might see ourselves” – as white South Africans – “revealed, as it were, by a mirror held up to us.”
This photograph is included in In Boksburg (first edition), 1982; Fifty-one Years, 2001; In Boksburg (second edition), 2015; and Structures of Dominion and Democracy, 2018.
“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).
