Documenting Life on Both Sides of the South African Color Line

New York Times

12-06-2025

David Goldblatt began photographing in 1948, the year apartheid was imposed in his native South Africa. He was just out of high school. A liberal Jew who hated the system of racial separation, Goldblatt, as an insightful outsider, depicted life on both sides of the color line. Documenting rather than proselytizing, for 70 years, until his death in 2018, he portrayed with unsurpassed clarity the societal warping and tension that apartheid inflicted — most brutally on people of color, but also on the ruling white minority.
The earliest photograph in 'David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive,' an impressive and moving retrospective through June 22 at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (seen previously at the Art Institute of Chicago and Fundación Mapfre in Madrid), dates from 1949. It is a picture of children, mostly Black but some white, laughing and playing on the border between two multiracial working-class Johannesburg suburbs that were about to be classified as white only, forcing most residents to relocate far away.
Compared with what followed, South Africa, at least in that scene, seems almost like Eden. As the longstanding reality of white supremacy became rigidly codified, you see in Goldblatt's photographs how a country of staggering wealth and beauty was twisted into an unnatural shape. In one emblematic tableau, a group of Black men, viewed from a distance, gather on a grassy outcrop that overlooks the tall buildings of Johannesburg. The skyline looms through a haze, a pale apparition that is geographically close but for these men impossible to enter.
Except, of course, as the servants and laborers who maintained the premises. In 1983 and 1984, Goldblatt rode the bus early in the morning with workers heading from Black communities to their jobs in Pretoria. He joined them again at night on the return. Each way could take more than three hours. Balancing himself and his Leica on the bumpy drive, shooting with fast film and no flash, he produced dark, grainy images, sometimes illuminated by the headlights of passing vehicles. Many of the passengers are asleep, but the less fortunate ones are standing. The feeling of fatigue is overwhelming.
Like one of his role models, Dorothea Lange, Goldblatt understood that the impact of a photograph is amplified by words and that, in his case, the photographs would be especially mystifying for audiences outside South Africa. To provide context, he wrote lengthy captions, which are included in the wall labels in the exhibition and in abbreviated form in the excellent catalog.
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