"South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk," which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last weekend, will induce simmering discomfort in its viewers as its record of South Africa's troubled social history unreels.
Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was exiled in the mid-'60s after the publication abroad of his book documenting the social experience of blacks in South Africa.
Billy Monk (1937-1982) recorded the awkward festivity of the dive bar where he worked.
Goldblatt, 82, is the senior and sole surviving photographer among the three represented here. He presents an early series that describes the sort of all-white suburb in which he grew up, recent landscape triptychs and portraits of convicted criminals at their crime scenes.
Goldblatt visited San Francisco for the SFMOMA opening. and we spoke in the galleries just after the pictures' installation.
Q: How much of your pictures' significance does one miss by never having visited South Africa?
A: I can only tell you that in 1968, I came to New York with the dummy of a book and showed it to a number of publishers to whom I had introductions. And in every case I had the same response. "Where's apartheid? Why aren't you showing apartheid?" But my photographs are all about apartheid, I'm just not showing the customary signs. My work tends to be more oblique.
When you walk in to the exhibition, there are several enlargements of pages from the Government Gazette setting out in manic detail the area designated for whites only and the area in the same town that has been designated for coloreds - coloreds meaning people of mixed blood. The area for blacks is not even mentioned there because it came under a different set of laws.
But that fundamentally gives a framework for the Boksburg photographs that you see in rooms one and two. This is an attempt to look at life in a white middle-class area in the time of apartheid. It will probably seem quite familiar to you if you know the work of an American photographer such as Bill Owens but the one essential fact was that blacks were not allowed into that community except if they had a permit to enter, or if they were guests.
Once you understand that, I don't think there's much that you would miss.
Q: Was it your suggestion to include the other photographers?
A: Sandy (Phillips) was keen on bringing Ernest Cole in, and I said I thought we ought to bring in Billy Monk because it's - adding pepper to the stew.
Ernest Cole was a black man who did a book in the 1960s on what it meant to be a black man in South Africa.
It was published in New York and London, and was immediately banned in South Africa.
Billy Monk was a white man. He was a bouncer in a low dive in Cape Town where, as far as we know, he took all of his photographs.
Q: Another question is that of access - who could look where, from behind the lens? Have you encountered that as a challenge?
A: During the years of apartheid, as a white man ... I could go almost anywhere. I was not allowed to go into designated black areas without a permit. If I did so ... I could be picked up by the police, so I always took great care to get a permit because ... I didn't want them to think that I was doing something surreptitious. ... I was occasionally questioned by the security police, but so were almost all of us who chose to work outside the studio. The security police were very well informed, and they were everywhere.
Ernest Cole had to carry a pass with him everywhere from the age of 16. ... And if he went into an area for which he didn't have permission, he could be picked up. Black people were extremely limited in their freedom to travel within the country of their birth. He then quite deliberately had himself reclassified as colored. ... I don't know how he did it, but he did, and that meant he had much greater freedom to move and pursue the essay he was working on.
Q: Did you know these two men?
A: I only met Ernest Cole once, very briefly ... and unfortunately I never saw him again after that.
Billy Monk I never knew at all. I saw his photographs in 1981 0r '82 and at that time I was connected to a little gallery, a community gallery in Johannesburg, and we showed them. He had never seen these prints. He was diving for diamonds on the west coast of Africa, and he was on his way to see the exhibition when he got into a brawl at a pub and was shot and killed.
Q: The influence of Diane Arbus seems apparent in many pictures in the show. Were you aware of her work?
A: I can't answer on Billy Monk's behalf, but I would imagine - though I could be completely wrong - that he had never heard of her or seen her work.
I saw it probably in the 1970s and I think it was bound to have influenced me.
Q: Seeing the recent triptychs here makes me wonder whether their widening of the view was something you felt impelled to do by social changes, or was it a technical matter?
A: I think it's more the latter. All of us photographers who try to find ways of impregnating the image with more than one can see, we've all at one stage or another experimented in various ways - panoramic cameras, sequences of photographed spliced together, which is much easier with Photoshop.
But I wanted a way of somehow putting into the photographs that ability we have as sentient beings with memory and consciousness to see around corners.
You were just talking about something you and I can't see at the moment, but we can both visualize. That ability is peculiar to humans, I think, or at least we don't seem to know about it in other animals. I wanted in a photograph to contain that ability somehow, so I began looking at the same phenomena from slightly different points of view. Not trying to keep the camera constant, but moving it.
Q: Are you shooting digitally now?
A: No. I have a digital camera with which I do some work, but most of my work is done on a view camera, with film, and I select images from contact prints and have them scanned, and then I sit with the man who does that at the computer, and he does for me what I would do in the darkroom.
I don't add things or take them out, but I control contrast, density and color saturation, if it's color, until we arrive at a print. We make test prints as we go along. It's a very convenient process. And if it's black and white and I don't want to make a silver print, he makes a special file for a silver print process and sends it to a company in Cape Town that has a machine that turns the electronic information into optical information. There's a scanner that goes across sensitized paper, conventional enlarging paper, and puts optical information onto the paper, which is then hand-processed in the traditional way.
Q: Can you say what you're working on thematically now?
A: We have a very high crime rate in South Africa. I've been working on a series where I meet and photograph ex-offenders who have been in trouble with the law at the scene of the crime they've committed, or which they're alleged to have committed. And I then record an interview with them and I publish or exhibit the pictures with very long captions, five or six hundred words. ... I've exhibited the work at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, at the Venice Biennale, in South Africa, and now here.