David Goldblatt began photographing in 1948, the year apartheid was imposed in his native South Africa. He was just out of high school. A liberal Jew who hated the system of racial separation, Goldblatt, as an insightful outsider, depicted life on both sides of the color line. Documenting rather than proselytizing, for 70 years, until his death in 2018, he portrayed with unsurpassed clarity the societal warping and tension that apartheid inflicted — most brutally on people of color, but also on the ruling white minority.
The earliest photograph in “David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive,” an impressive and moving retrospective through June 22 at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (seen previously at the Art Institute of Chicago and Fundación Mapfre in Madrid), dates from 1949. It is a picture of children, mostly Black but some white, laughing and playing on the border between two multiracial working-class Johannesburg suburbs that were about to be classified as white only, forcing most residents to relocate far away.
Compared with what followed, South Africa, at least in that scene, seems almost like Eden. As the longstanding reality of white supremacy became rigidly codified, you see in Goldblatt’s photographs how a country of staggering wealth and beauty was twisted into an unnatural shape. In one emblematic tableau, a group of Black men, viewed from a distance, gather on a grassy outcrop that overlooks the tall buildings of Johannesburg. The skyline looms through a haze, a pale apparition that is geographically close but for these men impossible to enter.
Except, of course, as the servants and laborers who maintained the premises. In 1983 and 1984, Goldblatt rode the bus early in the morning with workers heading from Black communities to their jobs in Pretoria. He joined them again at night on the return. Each way could take more than three hours. Balancing himself and his Leica on the bumpy drive, shooting with fast film and no flash, he produced dark, grainy images, sometimes illuminated by the headlights of passing vehicles. Many of the passengers are asleep, but the less fortunate ones are standing. The feeling of fatigue is overwhelming.
Like one of his role models, Dorothea Lange, Goldblatt understood that the impact of a photograph is amplified by words and that, in his case, the photographs would be especially mystifying for audiences outside South Africa. To provide context, he wrote lengthy captions, which are included in the wall labels in the exhibition and in abbreviated form in the excellent catalog.
You need a caption when you see, photographed from above with cool precision, a cell-like room with a piece of corrugated cardboard that cushions a concrete floor beneath a narrow cot. A chair holds a newspaper with a headline heralding the return of the Apollo 11 astronauts from the moon. This meager dwelling, so far removed in 1969 from extraterrestrial travel, is the living quarters of a maid in a white suburban house.
Unlike his most prominent Black colleague, Peter Magubane (1932-2024), Goldblatt chose not to photograph politically motivated violence, such as the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, two bloody milestones of the anti-apartheid struggle. And while Magubane was imprisoned and banned, Goldblatt worked freely. “I 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,” he wrote.
Goldblatt cited as an influence the American photographer Bruce Davidson, who took a large-format view camera to the tenements on East 100th Street in Harlem in the late ’60s, bestowing a dignified air of ceremony in his portraits of the impoverished residents. Goldblatt’s Black sitters, unlike Davidson’s, almost always look wary. Depicting the malaise of apartheid is at the core of Goldblatt’s artistic enterprise.His 1972 portrait of George and Sarah Manyane, dressed in their Sunday best in a stark, spotless home in Soweto, conveys a painfully vivid sense of their lives. Confined beneath a corrugated roof, protected by a door with multiple locks and separated from each other by a shiny metal post, the two stare impassively. George stands stiffly in the foreground, while in the rear, up against a wall of the bedroom, Sarah sits uncomfortably in a chair beneath a commercial calendar that features a glamorous white model, the sole decoration in the space. George’s shoes are worn and scuffed, Sarah’s feet are partly concealed by a crumpled piece of white fabric that serves as a rug, and what seems at first glance to be a crucifix is a latch on the open bedroom door.
Goldblatt advertised for white sitters in the Johannesburg suburbs by offering a free print and promising he had “no ulterior motive.” In his portraits of white South Africans, mostly Afrikaner descendants of the original Dutch settlers, Goldblatt captured bitter dissatisfaction or smug self-congratulation, depending on where they stood on the economic ladder. Simmering anger suffuses a picture of a farmer and his wife facing their aggrieved-looking son, over a table set for lunch with a jar of peanut butter and a platter of homemade bread. On the other end of the scale, a line of senior members of the National Party, which instituted apartheid, are seen listening to speeches in 1964, displaying an arrogance that recalls the politicians photographed in Hoboken, N.J. by Robert Frank a decade earlier.
In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photo Workshop, a photography school whose acclaimed alumni include Zanele Muholi and Jodi Bieber. His own work often alludes to his predecessors. His photograph of a supermarket employee collecting carts recalls a similar one by William Eggleston; a man mowing a rectangle of lawn across from a tract house bears a family resemblance to the pictures Robert Adams took in Colorado Springs, and a woman peeking through the window of her rolling food cart recalls a pose used by August Sander. Yet Goldblatt’s air of ethically informed detachment remains his own, regardless of aesthetic style.
Except for commercial assignments, he photographed almost exclusively in black and white before taking up color in the 1990s, as apartheid was coming to an end. His shift was inspired partly by technical advances in printing and by the critical reassessment of color photography, but it was also practical: One of his projects was documenting the pervasive presence of carcinogenic blue asbestos tailings in the environment.
As news reports remind us, the change in regime did not erase South Africa’s legacy of apartheid. One of Goldblatt’s most devastating photographs, from June 1999, shows Victoria Cobokana, a Black housekeeper, with her two small children in the dining room of her (presumably white) employer. Her broom is propped up to the side. African art adorns the wall. All three of the sitters look healthy and beautiful. Only by reading the caption do you learn that AIDS killed Cobokana that December, her son the following month, and her daughter the next May. In the picture, a round plate on the wall behind Cobokana’s kerchiefed head forms a halo for a Madonna grieving the tragedy she knows is coming.
David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive
Through June 22, Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven; 203-432-0600; artgallery.yale.edu.
The post Documenting Life on Both Sides of the South African Color Line appeared first on New York Times.
