One morning, in the middle-class suburb of Johannesburg where he lives, David Goldblatt found his camper van on bricks. "Someone had stolen the wheels during the night," he explains. Men armed with knives have burgled his home three times. Recently he and his wife were held up by robbers touting revolvers. The fences round the neighbourhood and the security guard at the entrance make no difference. Since the end of apartheid in the 1990s no one has been spared by the violence. "You could say it's progress," Goldblatt jokes. "Before, crime was restricted to the coloured neighbourhoods, because the police protected the whites. Nowadays everybody gets a share!"
Now aged 80 and a leading figure of South African photography, Goldblatt has lost none of his humour or his obstinacy. "Photography helps me overcome the dilemma of whether to live in this country or emigrate," he says. He spent years, largely ignored by the media, exploring the values of South Africa. His beautifully composed, subtle pictures dissect the country's contradictions, revealing the inner life of a still divided population. "I am a self-proclaimed, unlicensed social critic," he says. "I have South Africa in my blood. It is eating me up, irritating and worrying me. What would I do elsewhere?"
For TJ, 1948-2010 (TJ stands for Transvaal Johannesburg), his first major exhibition in Paris (until 17 April), at the Fondation Henri-Cartier-Bresson, Goldblatt is showing pictures he took in his city in the 1950s. "Such a fragmented place," he explains. With good reason. The apartheid regime separated ethnic groups, making sure one knew nothing about the other. By bringing together several series of pictures, the photographer produces a bitter kaleidoscopic portrait of Johannesburg.
He never tackles apartheid head-on. We see women doing housework, children playing around wrecked cars. Small details reveal the social injustice and racial discrimination. In the white neighbourhoods the coloured servants are sent to the backyard at nightfall or up to the roof, because they are forbidden to live in the same house as their masters.
One of the most powerful sequences was taken in Fietas, once an Asian neighbourhood until suddenly, in the 1970s the area was handed over to the whites. People lost their businesses, their neighbours and their past. Goldblatt merely suggests the violence of this upheaval. In one picture we see an elegant bedroom, but part of the double-bed belonging to the new occupants has been sawn off, too big to fit into the home they had been allocated. The buildings themselves bear a message. "I'm not interested in architecture as such," Goldblatt explains. "But South Africa is still a very young society and a lot of the things we build express our ethos. If you look at the Afrikaners' churches, you know what sort of people you're dealing with."
The most recent shots depict a land of even greater inequality. The old dormitory towns for coloured workers are now surrounded by shanty towns, only inhabited by blacks. And on the spot where anti-apartheid campaigners gathered in 1955 stands a flashy but deserted monument, the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication. "They spent millions of rand to build a fascist monument where no one wants to go," he says accusingly. "The values of the new South Africa are not the same values that Mandela stood up for; they are greed and self-congratulation."
For this exhibition, Goldblatt has added one last set of bittersweet pictures, inspired by his own experience of violence. "I wanted to see who the criminals were, to see if they were monsters or if they might have been my children," he explains. The photographer made contact with ex-prisoners, listened to their stories and took their portrait at the scene of the crime. His conclusion is that they are just fellow human beings, their life stories sadly similar: broken homes, poverty, unemployment. Most of them are trying to start over. "That's the worst part," Goldblatt says. "How on earth could a convict with a police record find work when in South Africa no one can?"
This article originally appeared in Le Monde