David Goldblatt

After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." He has numerous publications to his name.

Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province, and was the youngest of the three sons of Eli and Olga Goldblatt. His grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania around 1893, having fled the persecution of Jews there.

Goldblatt's father ran a clothing store, where his mother worked as a typist for a clothing company, which Goldblatt speculated may have been how they met. Goldblatt attended Krugersdorp High School, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a degree in commerce.

Goldblatt began photographing when he was a teenager. He got his first camera from his father, who bought it from Goldblatt's brother, who had brought home a damaged German Contax camera when he came back from serving in World War II. Though his first photographs were not groundbreaking, he enlisted help from a wedding photographer: "He would drape several cameras around my neck so that I looked very professional, and my job was to ensure that no guest with a good camera got a good picture . . . I would have to bump or walk in front of them at the critical moment so that my boss was the only person who ended up with good photographs.” A couple years later in 1963, as his skill developed, he sold the clothing shop that he had taken over on the death of his father in 1962, and became a full-time photographer. He documented developments in South Africa through the period of apartheid until it ended in the 1990s. However he was still making photographs up until his death in 2018.

Throughout his years as a photographer, Goldblatt never saw himself as an artist, and he was uncomfortable being seen as one. Many agree that he was a documentarian more than he was an artist. Goldblatt had an innovative approach to documentary photography. He made a life of photographing the issues that went beyond the events of apartheid and documented the conditions that led to them. Goldblatt was never comfortable with the fine art world. He went to exhibition openings but secretly hated the attention they threw upon him. He got around the label of artist by simply calling himself a photographer. He said: "I am a self-appointed observer and critic of the society into which I was born, with a tendency to giving recognition to what is overlooked or unseen."

Goldblatt's photography was not obviously politically charged. He claimed he was not an activist, unlike the majority of his friends and other photographers during this time. He in turn was looked down upon and disrespected for not involving himself in activism, on which he commented: "I wasn't prepared to compromise what I regarded as my particular needs." Instead of producing photographs which might "attempt to pass judgment," Goldblatt chose to "show the complexity of a situation."

Depictions of the everyday are frequent in Goldblatt's work. Instead of photographing the explicit violence of Apartheid South Africa, he preferred to document the violence of this era which exhibited itself in ordinary life: "I shun violence. And I wouldn't know how to handle it if I was a photographer in a violent scene."

During Apartheid, Goldblatt in his work The Transported of KwaNdebele documented the excruciatingly long and uncomfortable twice-daily bus journeys of black workers who lived in the segregated "homelands" northeast of Pretoria. The conditions had not changed that much for workers by 2007: "The bulk of people who live there still have to travel to Pretoria by road. It's still a very long commute for them every day – two to eight hours. . . . It will take generations to undo the consequences of Apartheid."

In the 1970s, Goldblatt documented one of the many injustices of the Apartheid South African government in a series of photographs of houses, shops and other types of architecture in the Johannesburg suburb, Pageview. The Group Areas Act of 1950 displaced much of the local population in favor of white South Africans. Goldblatt documented the local population's demonstrations of resistance and determination through their persistent occupation of their homes and businesses—regardless of the damage done.

After apartheid, Goldblatt continued to photograph within South Africa, particularly its landscapes.

In the work Goldblatt created during apartheid he never photographed in colour. Goldblatt observed that: "the use of colour during apartheid would have been inappropriate. It would have enhanced the beautiful and the personal, whereas black and white photographs to more effectively documented the external dramatic contradictions that defined this earlier period." In the 1990s he began working in colour, in a sense adapting to the digital age. "I’ve found the venture into color quite exciting . . . largely because new technology has enabled me to work with color on the computer as I have done with black and white in the darkroom." It was only after working on a project involving blue asbestos in north-western Australia, and "the resulting disease and death", that he "got hooked on doing work in color [because] You can’t make it blue in black and white."

This was coupled with new developments in digital scanning and printing. Only when Goldblatt was able to achieve the same "depth" in his colour work that he had previously achieved in his black and white photography did he choose to explore this extensively.

Goldblatt's work is held in major museum collections worldwide.^{[citation needed]}

Interest in Goldblatt's work increased significantly after a travelling exhibition of 51 years of his work (Barcelona, 2001), and the eleventh Documenta (Kassel, 2002). The former, which opened in the AXA Gallery in New York in 2001, offered an overview of Goldblatt's photographic oeuvre from 1948 to 1999. At Documenta, two projects were shown: black-and-white work depicting life in the middle-class white community of Boksburg in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as examples of later colour work from the series Johannesburg Intersections.^{[citation needed]}

Goldblatt's book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, published in 1998, offers an in-depth visual analysis of the relationship between South Africa's structures and the forces that shaped them, from the country's early colonial beginnings up until 1990.^{[citation needed]}

Goldblatt has written extensively on architecture and the deeper meaning contained within the buildings we occupy.

Goldblatt was inspired by photography in magazines such as Life, Look and Picture Post, which helped him with things such as captioning his photographs. Goldblatt also cited writers and visual artists as his major influences, among them Jillian Becker, Guy Tillim, Herman Charles Bosman, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, Ivan Vladislavic and playwright Barney Simon.^{[citation needed]}

Herman Charles Bosman specifically helped inspire Goldblatt in his second photo essay titled The South African Tatler.

Goldblatt helped influence the work of the photographer Santu Mofokeng as they studied together during the time of apartheid. Together they helped reinvent documentary and conceptual modes of photography, which led them to prominence and influence within documentary photography.

After founding the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 1989, Goldblatt turned no photographer, struggling or famous, away from his door. He was always accessible to everyone no matter what, even in his later life.

Goldblatt died on 25 June 2018 in Johannesburg from cancer. He had created photographs up until his death. He was survived by his wife, Lily Goldblatt, children Steven, Brenda, and Ronnie, and two grandchildren.

• On the Mines. With Nadine Gordimer. Cape Town: C Struik, 1973. ISBN 0-86977-029-2. (in English)
• Göttingen: Steidl, 2012. ISBN 978-3-86930-491-5.
• Some Afrikaners Photographed. Johannesburg: Murray Crawford, 1975. (in English)
• Cape Dutch Homesteads. With Margaret Courtney-Clark and John Kench. Cape Town: C Struik, 1981. ISBN 0-86977-140-X. (in English)
• In Boksburg. Cape Town: The Gallery Press, 1982. ISBN 0-620-05933-8. (in English)
• David Goldblatt: Thirty-five years of photographs, April 1983 to January 1984 / Vyf-en-dertig jaar se foto's, April 1983 tot Januarie 1984. Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1983. Small exhibition catalogue. (in Afrikaans and English)
• Lifetimes: Under Apartheid. With Nadine Gordimer. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1986. ISBN 0-394-55406-X. London: Cape, 1986. ISBN 0-224-02870-7. (in English)
• South Africa. London: The Photographers' Gallery, 1986. ISBN 0-907879-07-1. Small exhibition catalogue. (in English)
• The Transported of KwaNdebele: A South African Odyssey. With Brenda Goldblatt and Phillip van Niekerk. New York: Aperture Books, 1989. ISBN 0-89381-366-4, ISBN 0-89381-385-0. (in English)
• South Africa: The Structure of Things Then. Cape Town: Oxford University Press 1998. ISBN 0-19-571631-0. New York: Monacelli, 1998. ISBN 1-58093-026-3. With an essay by Neville Dubow. (in English)
• David Goldblatt. Phaidon 55. London: Phaidon, 2001. ISBN 0-7148-4051-3. With text by Lesley Lawson. (in English)
• David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years. Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001. ISBN 84-95273-78-0. (in English)
• Particulars. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 2003. ISBN 0-620-30659-9. ("Prix du Livre ", XVIe Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Arles 2004)
• David Goldblatt – Intersections. Munich: Prestel, 2005. ISBN 3-7913-3247-3.
• David Goldblatt – Photographs. Rome: Contrasto, 2006. ISBN 88-6965-015-4.
• David Goldblatt – Some Afrikaners Revisited. With Antjie Krog and Ivor Powell. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007. ISBN 1-4152-0025-4 (paper), ISBN 1-4152-0026-2 (hard). Revised and augmented edition of Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975).
• David Goldblatt: Photographs: Hasselblad Award 2006. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Gothenburg: Hasselblad Foundation, 2006. ISBN 3-7757-1917-2.
• David Goldblatt: Südafrikanische Fotografien 1952–2006. Winterthur: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2007. ISBN 3-85616-294-1. (in German)
• Intersections Intersected. Porto: Civilização Editoria; Fundação Serralves, 2008. ISBN 972-739-201-6. With text by Ulrich Loock and Ivor Powell. (in English)
• Intersecções intersectadas. Porto: Civilização Editoria; Fundação Serralves, 2008. ISBN 972-739-200-8, ISBN 972-26-2765-1. With text by Ulrich Loock and Ivor Powell. (in Portuguese)
• In Boksburg. Books on Books 7. New York: Errata Editions, 2010. ISBN 1-935004-12-3. (in English) A reduced-size facsimile of the 1982 book, with an essay by Joanna Lehan.
• Kith Kin & Khaya: South African Photographs. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 2010. ISBN 0-9869749-0-0, ISBN 0-9869749-1-9. (in English) Catalogue of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, 2010, and at the South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, 2010–2011.
• TJ / Double Negative: Johannesburg Photographs 1948–2010. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2010. ISBN 1-4152-0128-5. Contrasto Due, 2011. ISBN 88-6965-218-1. (in English) Two books in a box: TJ is a book of photographs by Goldblatt, Double Negative a novel by Ivan Vladislavić. (Best Photography Book, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards 2011)
• TJ / Johannesburg fotografie 1948–2010 / Doppia negazione. With Ivan Vladislavic. Contrasto, 2010. ISBN 978-88-6965-262-2. (in Italian)
• TJ. Arles: Actes Sud, 2011. ISBN 88-6965-271-8. (in French)
• David Goldblatt, Photographers' References, 2014. ISBN 978-2-9543839-1-0 (in English). An in depth interview led by Baptiste Lignel.
• Regarding Intersections. Göttingen: Steidl, 2014. ISBN 978-3-86930-714-5. With an essay by Michael Stevenson and an interview by Mark Haworth-Booth. Colour photographs in South Africa made between 2002 and 2011.
• Structures of Dominion and Democracy. Göttingen: Steidl, 2018. Edited by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska. ISBN 978-3-95829-391-5. A selective retrospective.

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

• 1987: Hallmark Fellow at the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), Aspen, Colorado^{[better source needed]}
• 1992: Gahan Fellow in Photography at Harvard University
• 1995: Camera Austria Award of the City of Graz for Contemporary Photography
• 2001: Honorary Doctor in Fine Arts, University of Cape Town
• 2006: Hasselblad Award – Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography
• 2007: Honorary Doctor of Literature, University of the Witwatersrand
• 2007: Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society
• 2009: HCB Award [Wikidata], Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
• 2010: Lucie Award, Lifetime Achievement Award, Lucie Foundation
• 2011: Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) (awarded, but declined by Goldblatt in protest over the Protection of State Information Bill)
• 2011: Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts San Francisco Art Institute
• 2013: Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Award for Lifetime Achievement, International Center of Photography, New York City

Goldblatt's work is held in the following permanent public collections:

• Durban Art Gallery
• Johannesburg Art Gallery
• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
• South African National Gallery, Cape Town
• University of South Africa, Pretoria
• Constitutional Court, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
• Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
• Fonds national d'art contemporain, Paris
• Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona
• Photographers' Gallery, London
• National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen
• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
• Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego
• Getty Center, Los Angeles