David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, the grandson of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He attended Krugersdorp High School, where his interest in photography began. Unable to pursue his desired career as a magazine photographer, he worked in his father’s men’s outfitting business and studied part-time to obtain his Bachelor of Commerce degree. After the death of his father Eli Goldblatt in 1962, he sold the family store and in September 1963, at age 33, he started to work as professional photographer.

In 1975, he published his first solo book ‘Some Afrikaners Photographed’. It compiled the work he had done between 1961 and 1968. By the end of the 1970s Goldblatt had published four books of photographs, all of them studies on South African life. He was also employed as picture editor at Leadership Magazine.

Goldblatt, along with a small group of white South African photographers, including Struan Robertson, followed the lead of some international photographers and set out to document social and political life in South Africa. He has been hailed for his vision and a career that has, to date, spanned almost five decades of work and great dedication to his craft. He is also one of the most interviewed and written about contemporary South African photographers.

David Goldblatt's unerring photographic records of South African life have concentrated on landscape and structure, people and context. His work is predominantly rooted in the most turbulent of times, high apartheid. Goldblatt remains a prolific talent in South Africa today and his recent shift to colour photography has only served to enhance his revealing portraits of apartheid's aftermath, South Africa today.

On the 8th of March 2006, Goldblatt was honoured for his portrayal of social and political life in the country of his birth. He received the 2006 Hasselblad Foundation Award in photography, which is considered the most prestigious of photography awards. The foundation cited that Goldblatt received the award because: ‘His acute historical and political perception provides a sense of the texture of daily life, and an important piece of missing information regarding life under apartheid in South Africa'. Goldblatt said of his own work:

‘Gradually I have come to realise that my concern with values has become a major preoccupation. If you had asked me about my motivations during the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, I wouldn't have expressed it this way. It is only now, looking back, that I see that this concern with values has been my most persistent thread. The reason this is so clear to me now, so long after the event, has to do with the end of apartheid’.

Goldblatt has published several books (see CV) and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, London Sunday Times, Town, Management Today, Vogue, Paris Match, Camera, Photography, Photography Yearbook and Optima. He also contributed to the Expo 67 exhibition and had a one-man show at The Space, Cape Town, and The Arena, Johannesburg.

David Goldblatt currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The following is an extract from Goldblatt’s autobiography, written for the Goodman Gallery:

"While working in the business and taking a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Witwatersrand University, my interest in photography continued and I taught myself basic skills. After the death of my father in 1962, I sold the family business and have, since September 1963, devoted all of my time to photography. My professional work has been almost entirely outside the studio and has involved a broad variety of assignments for magazines, corporations and institutions in South Africa and overseas. My personal work since 1961 has consisted of a series of critical explorations of South African society a number of which have been exhibited and published in book form.

In 1985 the British television network, Channel 4, made and screened a one hour documentary, "David Goldblatt: In Black and White", which was subsequently shown in the USA [PBS] and Australia. I was a Hallmark Fellow at the Aspen Conference in Design, Aspen, Colorado, 1987 and the Gahan Fellow in Photography at Harvard University in 1992. In 1995 I was awarded the Camera Austria Prize for an excerpt from my essay, "South Africa the Structure of Things Then". The University of Cape Town conferred the degree of Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts on me in 2001.

In 1989 I founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, with the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid. The Workshop has been successful in creating an environment in which people of all races collaborate constructively. It operates under a full-time director and part-time teachers, six days per week from premises in the Newtown Cultural Precinct of the city, qualifying about 250 students per annum, a number of whom, having completed advanced courses, are now working as professional photographers.

In 2001 a retrospective exhibition of my work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years co-curated by Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor and produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), began a tour of galleries and museums which has so far taken it to New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels and Munich. It opened in the Johannesburg Art Gallery in August 2005.

In 1998 I was the first South African to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, when photographs from the essay, “South Africa: the Structure of Things Then”, were shown. Excerpts from my photographic essays on Boksburg and on recent developments in Johannesburg were on exhibition at Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany in 2002. In 2004 the French National Art Collection acquired some 54 of my prints.

Invited in 1999 by the Art Gallery of Western Australia to participate in an exhibition entitled 'Home' and to contribute a photographic project of my choice in Australia to that show, I photographed an essay on Wittenoom, a town that had been decimated by the mining and effects of blue asbestos.

Since 1999 I have been photographing aspects of post-apartheid South Africa and exploring the use of colour photography in my personal work.

'Intersections', an exhibition of this work opened at the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf in June 2005 and is due tour to Austria and the United States. A book of the same title was published by Prestel, Munich, in June 2005."

References:

• David Goldblatt Biography [online] Available at: goodman-gallery.com [Accessed 16 April 2009]
• David Goldblatt [online] Available at: wikipedia.org [Accessed 16 April 2009]
• David Goldblatt: Works [online] Available at: photography-now.com [Accessed 16 April 2009]
• David Goldblatt: Photographs From South Africa [online] Available at: moma.org [Accessed 16 April 2009]
• O’Toole, S. (2002) David Goldblatt Biography [online] Available at: artthrob.co.za [Accessed 16 April 2009]