David Goldblatt
Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, South Africa
The violence so much a part of past and present South African life figures strongly in David Goldblatt’s latest exhibition, yet it is never explicitly recorded. Goldblatt, who won the 2006 Hasselblad Award, is not drawn to commotion. Instead, his interest lies with portraying subdued aftermaths and moments of quietly evolving consequence. He achieves this, most strikingly, in a clipped narrative sequence displayed at the entrance to the exhibition.
Spanning 40 years, three black and white photographs tell the story of a single Cape Town building, a synod hall belonging to a hard-line Calvinist church grouping once closely associated with apartheid-era ideology. A grainy 1965 photograph shows congregants inside the hall, rows of elderly white men dressed in black, many wearing tortoise-shell glasses. A spare exterior study from 1986 fixes the building in its confident heyday, while a recent ‘action’ shot from April 2007 shows the hall’s demolition.
Churches aside, Goldblatt has long been drawn to museums and mausoleums, not discriminating between formal or vernacular examples of the type. A recent colour work shows a bouquet of fake flowers attached to a rural fence, the scene commemorating a road traffic accident. Presented next to it is a photograph made 21 years earlier on the same road; it is an elevated view of nomadic farm labourers travelling in a cart. Both photographs are essentially landscape studies.
Landscapes abound in this show of photographic juxtapositions and clipped narrative sequences. A black and white photograph, made in 1985 but newly printed using digital technology, shows a young black child in threadbare clothes punching a clenched fist into the air alongside the graves of four recently murdered anti-apartheid activists. The large-format colour photograph next to it shows the same site 19 years on, now built up, metal plaques replaced with marble headstones. The narrative intent is obvious, as too the unyielding mise en scene, an arid Eastern Cape landscape.
Goldblatt’s recent fascination with landscape occasionally results in studies that are almost picturesque. ‘In the 1990s the anger dissipated,’ he has noted. ‘Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible.’ When Goldblatt does explore the permissible, the lyricism is spare and tentative, as in his colour photograph of Echo Canyon, in the far northern Cape.
Despite the unmitigated seriousness of the artist’s vision, which prompts the occasional lapse into didactic image making, the show is a tour de force. Not only does it elegantly suggest continuities between the subject matter of his older black and white photographs and his newer, large-format colour prints, but, more fundamentally, it reveals a late-career artist willing to take risks. That his experiments are slight, and remain couched in the unequivocal idiom of documentary, doesn’t lessen the intrigue of seeing Goldblatt pursuing new strategies to display, narrate, and perhaps even animate his work.
Sean O’Toole
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