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David Goldblatt
Johannesburg
‘Johannesburg’, Goldblatt wrote, ‘is not an easy city to love.’ But it was his home for over 50 years, and his muse for seven decades. From his teens in the 1940s until his death in 2018, Goldblatt photographed the city and its people, his work grouped in essays that reflected his diverse interests and creative approaches. The photographs exhibited here come from two essays, Intersections, which he worked on for over 20 years, from the early 1980s to around 2024, and Structures of Dominion and Democracy, which contains work spanning 60 years. They were both concerned with the ways in which our values are contained in our landscapes, monuments and buildings. Goldblatt was drawn, he said, ‘not to the events of the time, but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing happened and yet everything was contained and immanent.’ What is immanent here is both his hope in our political transformation and despair in our entrenched inequalities. Until the early 2000s Goldblatt worked in black and white, believing that colour photography was too sweet to capture the realities of apartheid. To mark our political change, he worked in colour for a time but returned to black and white in the later 2000s, depressed by the slow pace of change and the burdens of crime and corruption.
Brenda Goldblatt, July 2026
About David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt (b 1930 Randfontein, d 2018 Johannesburg) was a self-taught photographer. Described by writer Mark Gevisser as ‘ South Africa’s the visual conscience,’ he photographed the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa for over seven decades. His work is contained in over 25 books, including TJ, Some Afrikaners Photographed, On the Mines, Intersections, The Transported of Kwandebele, In Boksburg, The Structures of Things Then, Intersections, Particulars, Fragments of Fietas and Ex Offenders at the Scene of Crime. He co-founded the Market Photo Workshop in 1989 to offer photographic education to people excluded from tertiary art education. He published over 25 books in his lifetime, and four books of his work have been published since his death.
Museums where he has had solo shows include the Centre Pompidou and Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, (Paris); the Museum of Contemporary Art, (Sydney); the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, (New York); the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago); Yale University Art Gallery, (New Haven); MACBA, (Barcelona), Foundation Mafpre, (Madrid); Huis Marseilles, (Amsterdam), Serralves Foundation, (Porto), the Norval Foundation and Isiko, (Cape Town) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. He has participated in numerous group shows around the world.
He received several honorary doctorates and prizes, including the Hasselblad Award (2006) and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Creation Award. He was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France (2016). He is represented by the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town and London) and Galeria Elba Benitez (Madrid).