AXA Gallery-Press Release

From August 16 to October 6, 2001, the AXA Gallery will present a fifty-one year retrospective of the work of David Goldblatt, the renowned South African documentary photographer. The exhibition comprises over one hundred photographs taken between 1948 and 1999 — coinciding with the era of apartheid rule and, later, of transition to democracy — during which time, Goldblatt incisively probed and explored the South African social terrain. The exhibition is the first retrospective of his work to be held in the United States.

“This retrospective, while partially summarizing the photographic and textual essays published and exhibited by the artist, offers a wide selection of photographs taken in different communities over a period of several decades,” writes Corinne Diserens, who with Okwui Enwezor co-curated the exhibition. Goldblatt’s work represents “a link with the world and a critical exploration of South African society, where the memory of a recent history — that of the Industrial Revolution and its direct descendant, colonialism and of apartheid and after — is engaged.”

The exhibition and international tour have been organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The AXA Gallery is sponsored by AXA Financial and its subsidiary The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. Additional assistance has been provided by AXA Nordstern Art Insurance Corporation.

David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, a gold mining town near Johannesburg. His grandparents were Lithuanian immigrants who fled the persecution of Jews in the late nineteenth century. While his upbringing was liberal, Goldblatt grew up in a milieu of endemic racism which, beginning in the 1950s, was formalized into the ideology of apartheid. In his late teens he began what became a lifetime’s pursuit: “to probe and question the values of his immediate world.” Over the years these explorations led to a number of photographic essays from which the present exhibition was drawn.

Air and water hoses have been lowered to the bottom and are being connected to drill the blast holes. Shaft No. 4, President Steyn Gold Mine, Welkom, Orange Free State. January 1970

On the Mines. In the 1960s, Goldblatt began photographing the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, South Africa’s famous “Reef of Gold,” where the industrial landscape and social substructures were disappearing under economic pressure. “They were dying, and I wanted to hold something of that world before it disappeared.” The resulting photographs, of white managers and black laborers and of working conditions (notably the terrifying process of shaftsinking that took place more than a mile underground) are at once a record of a way of life and a study of extremes. The undertaking culminated in the first of several collaborations with the writer Nadine Gordimer who, like Goldblatt, was born and raised in the Witwatersrand region. Their respective essays were published in the book, On the Mines (Struik, 1973). Thirteen years later, they collaborated on Lifetimes: Under Apartheid (Knopf, 1986), an anthology of writings and photographs.

Some Afrikaners. Having grown up among and yet largely apart from Afrikaners, Goldblatt felt compelled to know more about the group whose powerful influence so pervaded South African life. Likewise, he was intrigued by his own ambivalence toward the contradictory nature of people at once generous in spirit and yet full of fear and even often of hate. “I needed to grasp something of what a man is and is becoming in all the particularity of himself and his bricks and bit of earth and of this place and to contain all this in a photograph. To do this, and to discover the shapes and shades of his loves and fears and of my own, would be enough.” The resulting photographs were published in 1975 in the book Some Afrikaners Photographed (Murray Crawford). The photographic essay was indicative of other published essays that followed in the even-handed, even sympathetic way in which Goldblatt sought out “the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent…”

The Modis’ daughter in their shop before its destruction under the Group Areas Act, Fietas, January1977.

One of the most insidious effects of apartheid was the system of strict racial separation that “discouraged and denied us the chance to experience the lives of people of a different racial category.” During the 1970s, Goldblatt photographed in “black” communities, including Soweto and Transkei. In 1976-77, he worked in Fietas, a small Indian suburb of Johannesburg. In all of these projects he was concerned mainly with daily life of people and their relationship to the landscape and built environment within the context of apartheid.

In Boksburg. In 1970 and 1980, Goldblatt photographed life in a white, middle-class, small-town community — Boksburg, near Johannesburg. “It was as though I had known the place for a very long time and was yet discovering it now for the first. The spaces and roads and the lines painted on them, the low buildings and sky; the veld and the way the town sat on it, with the people, white and black, moving in their separate but tangled ways: all of these were there to be seen in the cutting sharpness of the highveld light.” The resulting publication, In Boksburg (The Gallery Press, Cape Town, 1982) keenly describes the characteristic homogenization of suburbia, at the same time that it represents a return to and re-examination of the world in which he was raised.

Going home: 8:45pm, Marabastad-Waterval bus; some of these passen-gers will reach home at 10pm and start the next day at 2am, 1984

The Transported. In 1983, Goldblatt was invited to produce a photographic essay on homeland transport — a form of commuting to work resulting from the apartheid system of “spatial engineering.” The strict separation of races required that black South Africans be segregated into ethnic areas called bantustans, or homelands. Because most of the homelands were remote from major centers of work, much of the labor force was moved across long distances in subsidized bus and train services. The resulting study was published as The Transported of KwaNdebele (Aperture, in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, 1989).

Structures. For a period of about fifteen years, Goldblatt was engaged in an ongoing project documenting the built environment of South Africa, closely examining the ways in which values had been expressed in South Africa’s built and ideological structures. “Many of our structures tell much and plainly and with extraordinary clarity, not only of qualities of existence and of the needs, conceits, longings, and fears of those who built and used them, but often too of vital beliefs and ideologies upon which lives here were contingent…Our structures often declare quite nakedly, yet eloquently, what manner of people built them, and what they stood for.” The Structures of Things Then (The Monacelli Press, 1998) was published and formed the basis of a one-person exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001, the University of Cape Town conferred on Goldblatt an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art.

The exhibition David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years is accompanied by a catalogue published by Actar and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The fully-illustrated catalogue contains essays by J. M. Coetzee, Corinne Diserens, Okwui Enwezor, Michael Godby, Nadine Gordimer, Chris Killip, and Ivan Vladislavic.

The AXA Gallery presents works from all fields of the visual arts, with a special emphasis placed on exhibitions that would not otherwise have a presence in the city. The AXA Gallery is located in the atrium lobby of Equitable Tower, 787 Seventh Avenue at 51st Street, in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Sundays. Admission is free.