David Goldblatt @ Pace Gallery, NYC - Strange Instrument, Curated by Zanele Muholi,

David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument

Curated by Zanele Muholi

Pace Gallery, New York

in collaboration with Yancey Richardson Gallery

Through March 27, 2021

“The camera is a strange instrument. It demands, first of all, that you see coherently. It makes it possible for you to enter into worlds, and places, and associations that would otherwise be very difficult to do.” – David Goldblatt, in an interview with Art21 that aired in September 2018

DAVID GOLDBLATT 

George and Sarah Manyane, 3153 Emdeni Extension, August 1972 

© The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust, courtesy Pace Gallery and Goodman Gallery 

Pace Gallery presents David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument, an exhibition that brings together 45 photographs documenting South Africa—where DAVID GOLDBLATT  was born in 1930 and lived until his death in 2018—at the height of apartheid, between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s. Curated by artist and activist ZANELE MUHOLI, who was David Goldblatt’s friend and mentee, the exhibition offers a deeply personal meditation on the brutality and humanity that David Goldblatt captured in his strikingly beautiful images of everyday lives under conditions of profound injustice. Strange Instrument marks the first time that Zanele Muholi has engaged with David Goldblatt’s work since his passing in 2018. Taking an expansive and affective approach to their mentor’s body of work, the exhibition presents a portrait of David Goldblatt himself through Zanele Muholi’s eyes.

Surveying the diverse range of David Goldblatt’s output, the show encompasses portraits and street scenes shot on the corners and parks of Johannesburg and other cities, as well as in neighborhoods and segregated townships where black and “colored” communities lived. Many such locales were later subjected to systematic demolition and dispossession of land, making David Goldblatt’s photographs some of their only existing documentation. Such scenes are interwoven with images of commerce, architecture, mining, religion, leisure, and domestic life. The earliest image in the exhibition dates to 1962—just over a decade after the segregationist National Party rose to power in South Africa—and the latest work dates to 1990, the year that anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. David Goldblatt did not consider himself an activist and never set out to make political work or anti-apartheid “propaganda”; however, he was always clear about his mission to expose the social and interpersonal reality of South Africa’s policies. “I will not allow my work to be compromised,” he once declared in an interview with Art21 which was filmed and edited in the months prior to his passing in June 2018. “I comprise every day just by drawing breath in this country.”

Zanele Muholi first became aware of David Goldblatt in the early 2000s through their involvement in the Market Photo Workshop—a creative community, gallery, and school in Johannesburg dedicated to contemporary photography, which David Goldblatt helped to found. Influenced by David Goldblatt’s Particulars series—which features extreme close-up crops of bodies— Zanele Muholi struck up a friendship with the renowned photographer, though they were separated in age by more than five decades. “David became more than just a [mentor], he became a friend and a father figure,” Zanele Muholi recalls, “He was a chosen person in my life who made a huge difference.” Although David Goldblatt’s body of work spans more than seven decades, the exhibition concentrates on the South Africa of the 1970s and ‘80s—the world in which Zanele Muholi themself came of age.

Equal parts artist and documentarian, David Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs. To balance the authoritative weight of Goldblatt’s captions, Zanele Muholi has grouped the works in the show into 23 idiosyncratic categories of their own devising—on subjects such as “Nurturing,” “Sleep,” “Friendships,” “Textures,” “Poverty,” and “Pulse”—which reflect their own individual response to the image alongside the historical information contained in the caption.

David Goldblatt’s images rarely picture outright violence or exploitation, but more often capture the subtleties and nuances of apartheid’s insidious effect on the mundane existence of communities of color. The formal beauty of the images is often a mechanism for rendering palpable the sinister ways in which apartheid infiltrated even the most private and mundane aspects of social existence. “A common response from potential publishers was: Where are the apartheid signs?” David Goldblatt once recalled to Art21 of his efforts to publish his work abroad: “To me, [apartheid] was embedded deep, deep, deep in the grain of those photographs. People overseas simply didn’t grasp these extraordinary contradictions in our life.” While David Goldblatt’s ability to gain access to and make photographs in such a wide range of contexts is partly what allowed him to produce such an extraordinary and influential body of work, it also reflected his privileged status as a white person under conditions of strict racial segregation. No black photographer could have moved so easily through such a diversity of social spaces. As a Jewish person, David Goldblatt meanwhile existed apart from the dominant white community of Afrikaaners, and often described feeling internally like an outsider—a self-alienation that sharpened his critical gaze.

For Zanele Muholi, David Goldblatt’s work points us to the fact that ultimately, “photography is about accessibility.” How do images grant access to the lives of others, to vital yet problematic histories that time threatens to erode, and to stories and experiences that might otherwise have been rendered invisible? Access is also a marker of privilege, an index of who possesses the power to make such documents, to wield the camera, to capture a photograph: “How were these images taken really?” Zanele Muholi asks of David Goldblatt’s portraits of anonymous people in the markets and parks of Johannesburg and Transkei. “How do they speak to the South African archives? […] I, as a black person, would not have had access to those spaces and the people that [Goldblatt] had the opportunity to photograph.” Zanele Muholi describes this exhibition as an effort to explore the “living memory” of David Goldblatt, which continues his lifelong project of exposing conditions of injustice and oppression—those “extraordinary contradictions”—which did not disappear with the formal end of the apartheid regime.

DAVID GOLDBLATT (b. 1930, Randfontein, South Africa; d. 2018, Johannesburg, South Africa) chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018.

Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, David Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during and following the time of apartheid. David Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era and post-apartheid monuments, buildings, churches, signs, ruins, and other imprints on the South African landscape made by society with the idea that structures reveal something about the values of the people who built them.

In 1989, David Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg to provide further education in visual literacy to students disadvantaged by apartheid. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.

PACE GALLERY 

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 

www.pacegallery.com

Everything was moving: Photography from the sixties and seventies at Barbican Art Gallery, UK

Everything was moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s 
Barbican Art Gallery, London
13 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

I love all art medium but it is always a pleasure to share inforations about a major photography exhibition. This one is particulary interresting because it surveys the medium from an international perspective, and includes renowned photographers from across the globe, all working during two of the most memorable decades of the 20th Century. everything was moving: photography from the 60s and 70s tells a history of photography, through the photography of history. It brings together over 350 works, some rarely seen, others recently discovered and many shown in the UK for the first time.

It features key figures of modern photography including Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, David Goldblatt, Graciela Iturbide, Boris Mikhailov and Shomei Tomatsu, as well as important practitioners whose lives were cut tragically short such as Ernest Cole and Raghubir Singh. Each contributor has, in different ways, advanced the aesthetic language of photography, as well as engaging with the world they inhabit in a profound and powerful way.

The exhibition is set in one of the defining periods of the modern age – a time that remains an inescapable reference point even today. The world changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, shaped by the forces of post-colonialism, and Cold War neo-colonialism. This momentous epoch in history coincided with a golden age in photography: the moment when the medium flowered as a modern art form.

Great auteur photographers emerged around the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world. Many, working increasingly independently from the illustrated press, and freed from the restraints of brief and commission, were able to approach the world on their own terms, and to introduce a new level of complexity to photographic imagery. Others, such as Li Zhensheng (China) and Ernest Cole (South Africa), found themselves living in situations of extreme repression, but devised inspiring strategies to create major works of photography in secrecy and at huge personal risk.

Back in the 1960s, many commentators viewed photography as inferior to painting or sculpture, because it simply recorded, mechanically, what could be seen, and was judged to be concerned primarily with reporting the facts (journalism) or campaigning for change (social documentary). Attitudes changed during this period, and the art museum slowly opened its doors to the medium. Less concerned to change the world, or to merely describe it, a new generation of photographers were driven to understand that world, as well as their place within it.

The exhibition presents a selection of works by the Chinese photographer, Li Zhensheng, some never before revealed in public. An aspiring artist and filmmaker, Li Zhensheng worked throughout the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) for the Heilongjiang Daily, the local newspaper of Harbin in the far North East of China, on the border with Russia. He, like everyone else in the country found himself caught up in the mad spiral of indoctrination and violence that was Mao’s ‘revolution’– at times as a participant, at others as a victim. At great personal risk, Li Zhensheng photographed in secret, and then buried those photographs, some 30,000 negatives, under his mud floor. The material only came fully to light in the West at the end of the 20th century. It is the most complete visual record known of this extraordinary period of human history.

In a very different response to totalitarianism, acclaimed conceptual photographer, Boris Mikhailov lived and worked in Kharkhov at the height of Soviet domination of the Ukraine. Boris Mikhailov developed a distinctive artistic approach, with which to evade the censors and to satirize Soviet occupation, as well as the tenets of socialist realism. The exhibition includes the first UK showing of his very first series, Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1968-1975, a collection of radical, often hilarious montages.

A pioneer of colour, Indian artist Raghubir Singh (1942-1999) was driven to create a photography that was emphatically modern and Indian. He broke abruptly with the colonial tradition of single-point perspective, picturesque, depopulated landscapes – to describe an India which was peopled, frenetic and luminous. His so-called theory of ‘Ganges modernism’ pitted colour and spirituality against the monochromatic angst and alienation of Western figures such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. The work of Raghubir Singh has never been thoroughly evaluated in the UK, and this selection includes rarely seen images from the extraordinary archives of the early part of his career.

In stark contrast to Raghubir Singh’s colourful exuberance, an unrelentingly black-and-white aesthetic emerged in Japan, exemplified by the work of Shomei Tomatsu who is widely considered the ‘godfather’ of modern Japenese photography and a major influence on Daido Moriyama. In Shomei Tomatsu’s first-ever British museum showing, life in 1960s and 1970s Japan is evoked in metaphoric, angry, uncompromisingly monochrome pictures. Shomei Tomatsu rails against continuing American military occupation at Okinawa (the base from which Vietnam was being bombed); the growing impact of American capitalism on Japenese culture; and the devastating psychological legacy of Nagasaki.

Where most of Africa was – in theory at least – liberated from colonial domination by the early 1960s, in South Africa, a government – inspired by Nazi Germany and ignored by the West – was starting to build its heinous apartheid regime. Across the Atlantic, in another society dominated by white racism and racial segregation, the Southern states of America saw the stirrings of change as the civil rights movement gathered pace. The struggle for civil rights –from Selma to Soweto, the Amazon to Londonderry – was to define the spirit of the times: as did an increasingly angry global opposition to the neo-colonial war that America was waging in Vietnam.

Johannesburg-based David Goldblatt, is, perhaps more than any other photographer since Eugène Atget, linked inextricably with the country of his birth. Over five decades, David Goldblatt has created arguably one of the most important bodies of documentary photography in the history of the medium. He has forged a complex, contradictory tableau of South Africa’s fractured society, during and after apartheid. For this exhibition, David Goldblatt has personally revisited his major series of the 1960s and 1970s, from On the Mines with Nadine Gordimer, to Some Afrikaners Photographed, and In Boksburg. The selection includes rarely exhibited works.

Long thought lost for ever, an incredible collection of vintage prints by the black South African Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was recently rediscovered and will be shown for the first time in Britain at Barbican Art Gallery. Ernest Cole somehow persuaded the Race Classification Board that he was not ‘black’ but ‘coloured’ (he changed his name from Kole to Cole) and was therefore able to practice as a photographer at a time when many black photographers were persecuted and imprisoned. Ernest Cole’s courage and determination were matched by his artistic talent. He escaped South Africa on 9 May 1966, and in exile in New York was to publish House of Bondage, 1967, an indelible record of what it was to be black under apartheid. Ernest Cole was never able to return home and he died in poverty, his negatives given away, it is believed, in lieu of an unpaid hotel bill.

South Africa ’s extraordinary tradition of realist photography during this period is contrasted with major American contemporaries. Bruce Davidson and William Eggleston are two of the giants of 20th century photography. In many ways, they are diametrically opposed in philosophy and approach, and yet at points in the 1960s they shared subject matter: both were photographing people and places in the contested landscape of the Southern states as the struggle for equality unfolded.

Time of Change, 1961-1965, one of Bruce Davidson’s most powerful series, has never been exhibited in the UK. On May 25, 1961 the 28-year old photographer joined a group of Freedom Riders making a terrifying journey by bus from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. It was the starting point of a four-year project for Bruce Davidson, in which he captures the mood and the events of the civil rights struggle, in a series of poignant and empathetic pictures. Where Bruce Davidson was interested in the human reality of the south, in contrast, William Eggleston, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, perplexed the critics with his seeming lack of subject matter, lack of composition - and lack of a photographic agenda. Now, he is widely viewed as a brilliant innovator who revolutionized photography with his ‘democratic’, non-hierarchical vision, his ‘shotgun’ aesthetic and his radical use of colour. William Eggleston’s classic pictures of the period – affectless, brooding images of the Deep South, saturated in vivid colour, and shot through with a sense of menace, equally conjure the mood of the time.

Also included: major contributions by Hasselblad-award winners Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) and Malick Sidibé (Mali); a little-seen allegorical work by Sigmar Polke (Germany) ; and a selection of Larry Burrows’ (UK) powerful Vietnam portraits.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said:

I am delighted to bring together an amazing group of photographers whose striking and powerful images of the 1960s and 1970s make us look at the world again. everything was moving explores a spectrum of different photographic approaches, and asks if, in the early 21st century, we are finally prepared to erase the distinction between art photography and documentary photography.

This exhibition is supported by The Japan Foundation, Institut Français, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and The Nehru Centre.

Art Gallery, Barbarican Centre's website: www.barbican.org.uk

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt at The Jewish Museum

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt

The Jewish Museum, NYC

May 2 - September 19, 2010

The Jewish Museum in New York will present South African Photographs: David Goldblatt, an exhibition of 150 black-and-white silver gelatin prints taken between 1948 and 2009. The photographs on view focus on South Africa’s human landscape in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

David Goldblatt has used his camera to explore South Africa’s mines; the descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers called Afrikaners who were the architects of apartheid; life in Boksburg, a small middle-class white community; the Bantustans or “puppet states” in which blacks were forced to live; structures built for purposes ranging from shelter to commemoration; and Johannesburg, the city in which Goldblatt lives. South African Photographs: David Goldblatt is the largest New York City exhibition of Goldblatt’s work since 2001.

David Goldblatt is recipient of the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. As a photographer, Goldblatt has not documented major political events or horrifying incidents of violence. His work is characterized by exacting compositions, the precise play of light and shadow on his prints, the deep engagement with his subjects, and the multiple meanings and complicated realities that surface in his images.

David Goldblatt once wrote, “I am neither an activist nor a missionary. Yet I had begun to realize an involvement with this place and the people among whom I lived that would not be stilled and that I needed to grasp and probe. I wanted to explore the specifics of our lives, not in theories but in the grit and taste and touch of things, and to bring those specifics into that particular coherence that the camera both enables and demands.”

Born and raised in Randfontein, South Africa, a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, in 1930, David Goldblatt has been photographing the changing political landscape of his country for more than five decades. He is descended from Lithuanian Jews who fled Europe in the 1890s to escape religious persecution. His father passed on to him, the artist said, “a strong sense of outrage at anything that smacked of racism.” Growing up in segregated South Africa, he witnessed the deep humiliation and discrimination suffered by blacks and experienced anti-Semitism personally. These experiences have informed his work.

David Goldblatt’s written commentary is an essential part of his work and is presented throughout the exhibition in the texts and labels that accompany the photographs. A context room in the exhibition will feature a timeline juxtaposing events in South African history and David Goldblatt’s life; books published by the photographer; photography magazines that inspired him; a large map of South Africa; and a 22-minute excerpt of David Goldblatt: In Black and White, a 1985 film originally aired on Channel 4 Television in Great Britain.

The exhibition has been organized by The Jewish Museum’s Senior Curator, Susan Tumarkin Goodman.

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt is made possible through the generosity of an anonymous donor in memory of Curtis Hereld; the Joseph Alexander Foundation; Goldie and David Blanksteen; Nisa and Bradley Amoils; The Long Island Community Foundation - Stanley & Marion Bergman Family Charitable Fund; the Robert I. Goldman Foundation; the estate of Rhoda Cutler; and other donors.      

Related Exhibition

 

South African Projections: Films by William Kentridge will be on view at The Jewish Museum from May 2 through September 19, 2010. The exhibition features four films from South African artist William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection. They portray fictional Jewish characters who embody the political and moral legacy of apartheid.

Previous Posts about The Jewish Museum Exhibitions

 

Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and Hans Augusto Rey

 

The Monayer Family: Three Videos by Dor Guez

 

Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention

The Jewish Museum
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