Latest news with #DavidGoldblatt
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nessun Dorma podcast: a 1980s and 1990s football odyssey
The European Championships of 1980 and 2000 were only 20 years apart. They also belonged, both literally and figuratively, to different millennia. Euro 80 was a violent mess of negativity, apathy and hooliganism, Euro 2000 a joyous, sunkissed celebration of 21st-century football. That jarring contrast was the spark for the latest series of Nessun Dorma: an odyssey through the history of football in the 1980s and 1990s. Our aim is to highlight, via a series of subterranean dives into each football season, how it went from being a 'a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people' – as a Sunday Times editorial called it in 1985 – to a multi-gazillion pound industry. There are multiple episodes per season, as well as deep dives into the major international tournaments and some diversions into the wider world of sport and pop culture. Guests include Pat Murphy, David Goldblatt, Dominic Sandbrook, Kieran Maguire, Tony Evans, Gordon Smith and Scott Murray. There are Patreon exclusives, too: Q&As and a regular weekly feature called, er, This Week, in which we kick around seven dates from football's past. We'll soon be launching a Discord channel in which subscribers can hang out (okay, nerd out) with one another and the Nessun Dorma team. The more subscribers we have, the more we can all bathe in the past and pretend 2025 isn't happening. Think of it as a charitable donation. The main series is ongoing – we're currently at the business end of a quite glorious Euro 84 – and will probably end sometime in 2029. Here's what we've covered so far. We start at the bottom: the European Championship of 1980, a miserable, violent tournament played largely in front of empty stadia in Italy. Then we turn to the 1980-81 season, memorable in this country for the exploits of Aston Villa, Ipswich, Tottenham Hotspur – and Liverpool, who made amends for an unusually dismal league campaign by winning the European Cup for the third time. Euro 80 | Ipswich, Villa and Spurs (pt1) | Ipswich, Villa and Spurs (pt2) | Crystal Palace, Team of the Eighties | Liverpool's European triumph | Man Utd sack Dave Sexton | Cricket: Botham's Ashes? There were underdog stories galore in 1981-82, from Swansea's rise through the divisions to Liverpool rumbling inexorably through the field to win the title. Okay, that's hardly an underdog story but they were 12th at Christmas. We also look at the brief dominance of Spain's New Firm, Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao, and how a young Sven-Göran Eriksson led IFK Gothenburg to an emphatic Uefa Cup triumph. Liverpool, Swansea and more | Hooliganism and the Falklands | Sven, Gothenburg and the Uefa Cup | Spanish New Firm If you're aged between 44 and 54 – you are, aren't you – there's a fair chance you'll regard 1982 as the best World Cup of your lifetime. We devoted eight episodes to a festival of football in Spain. England | Scotland | Northern Ireland | Algeria and Cameroon | Brazil | Italy 3-2 Brazil & West Germany 3-3 France | Post-mortem | The draft The shock of the new was a recurring theme of the 1982-83 season. We discuss the other New Firm, the one established in Scotland by Sir Alex Ferguson and Jim McLean, celebrate the rise of Watford and Luton in England, investigate how Hamburg beat Juventus's galacticos to Europe's top table and trace the oft-forgotten origin of the ferocious rivalry between Arsenal and Manchester United. We also talk to Brighton striker Gordon Smith about one of the biggest what-ifs in FA Cup history and recall the retirement of English football's unassuming giant: Bob Paisley, who slipped quietly away from Liverpool after winning his sixth title in nine years. 'And Smith must score…' | Scotland's new firm | Origin story: Arsenal and Man Utd | The rise of Watford and Luton | Hamburg winning the European Cup | Bob Paisley's retirement On the morning of 25 April 1984, there was a fair chance that the three European finals that season would be all-British affairs. We cover the dramatic, brain-melting events of that day in a bumper pod, while also devoting episodes to the European runs of Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur. Spurs were making headlines off the field too: we talk to Kieran Maguire about their groundbreaking floatation and the impact it had on football over the next 20-30 years. Nessun Dorma regulars Gary Naylor (Everton) and Mac Millings (Watford) do their best to remain impartial while recalling the 1984 FA Cup final between the sides. And the great David Goldblatt recalls the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. The Division One season | 25 April 1984 | Kieran Maguire on the Tottenham flotation | Liverpool's European Cup triumph | Spurs' Uefa Cup run | FA Cup final | David Goldblatt on the LA Olympics It's hard to believe now, but the European Championship was an endangered species going into the 1984 tournament in France. Sixteen days of pulsating, unfettered football changed all that – although you wouldn't necessarily have known it in England, where only two of the 15 games were shown live. We've set aside seven episodes to cover the tournament, including two on the qualifiers alone. When you hear some of the stories – like the botched three-on-none attack that cost Bulgaria a place in France – you'll understand why. Qualifiers (pt1) | Qualifiers (pt2) | Group 1 | Group 2 | Semi-final one We are also running a sport draft for every year of our odyssey from 1980-2000. Mike Gibbons, Mac Millings and Gary Naylor each try to capture the sporting year with their choices, while also attempting discreet drive-bys on each other's selections. 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 We've done a handful of other drafts as well, including a couple of World Cups from the 1990s. Cricket World Cups. Division One 1984-85 | England in the 1990s | Premier League 1992-93 | Champions League 1999-2000 | Cricket World Cup 1992 | Cricket World Cup 1999 Since our last Sport Network post – where did those two years go – we've relived USA 94, from the shocking murder of Andres Escobar to the genius of Gheorghe Hagi, Romário, Roberto Baggio and Hristo Stoichkov. Preview | Groups A & B | Groups C & D | Groups E & F | Last 16 | Quarter-finals | Semi-finals | Final and post-mortem Last but not least, there are a number of one-off episodes on a variety of subjects. When Italian Football Ruled Europe | Elton Welsby interview | Gary Lineker | The 1994-95 English season | Remembering Sven Nessun Dorma is available on iTunes, Spotify and Substack. You can also find it on Bluesky and Patreon.
New York Times
12-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Documenting Life on Both Sides of the South African Color Line
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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
17-05-2025
- General
- Washington Post
His photographs cut through apartheid — and never diminished their subjects
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A photograph by David Goldblatt shows a family in bed reading the weekend papers. Until apartheid began to crumble in 1990, Goldblatt, who took pictures in South Africa for more than 70 years, photographed almost exclusively in black-and-white. He turned to color only after the regime was dismantled.
Wall Street Journal
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive' Review: The Aura of Apartheid
New Haven, Conn. There are some works of art so magisterial that the only appropriate response to them is silence, because anything one says will be inadequate and could potentially diminish them. The photographs of David Goldblatt are of that order, so I proceed with trepidation in discussing 'David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive' at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 22. Judy Ditner, curator of Photography and Digital Media at Yale, ably organized the roughly 150 mostly black-and-white prints. Ms. Ditner, with Leslie M. Wilson and Matthew S. Witkovsky, also edited the excellent catalog.
Boston Globe
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
At Yale, a David Goldblatt retrospective bears eloquent witness to apartheid-era South Africa and beyond
All of which is to say that the medium has known few greater bearers of witness than Satisfyingly extensive, the show includes nearly 125 photographs by Goldblatt, work by South African photographers who were his contemporaries or friends or students, maquettes, contact sheets, vintage magazines, and various documents, including text for a classified advertisement from the early ′70s. The ad asked interested readers to let Goldblatt photograph them, offering assurances that the photographer had 'no ulterior motive,' hence the exhibition subtitle. Advertisement Goldblatt's artistic stature makes the relative unfamiliarity of his surprising. That's owing in large part to his having faced a kind of cultural double bind. He lived in a society, apartheid-era South Africa, that needed witness borne as have few others. Yet the ostracism of that society meant his work lacked the prominence and recognizability enjoyed by lesser photographers elsewhere. Advertisement David Goldblatt, "At Kevin Kwanele's Takwaito Barber, Lansdowne Road, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in the time of AIDS, 16 May 2007." Yale University Art Gallery Also, the work doesn't fit easily into a particular genre or category. There are portraits, landscapes, reportage, though that's too limiting a term. In the late ′90s Goldblatt fully embraced color, a further diversification. Color had the effect, however paradoxical, of softening, at least somewhat, the harsh South African light. Note the delicate blueness of the cloudless sky in a 2007 photograph of an outdoor barber in Cape Town. Goldblatt photographed mines, churches, people in their homes, people on the street, workers on the job, Soweto, scenes of wealth, scenes of poverty, and most tellingly perhaps, how those scenes could overlap and confound an observer. Yet he avoided cheap incongruities, even if ever there was a society of not just cheap but grotesque incongruities it was South Africa during those years and beyond. What unites such variousness is a consistent scrupulosity of vision: unfussy, unfancy, unblinking, unfailingly humane, and no less unfailingly curious. David Goldblatt, "Methodists meet to find ways of reducing the racial, cultural, and class barriers that divide them, 3 July 1980." Yale University Art Gallery Being white put Goldblatt in the minority in South Africa, albeit a minority with overwhelming power and no hesitation to use it. Being the grandson of Lithuanian Jews made him an outsider within that minority. It was a status that allowed him to notice things — that made him need to notice them — others might overlook or, far more commonly, choose to ignore. What Goldblatt found himself photographing was, as he once put it, 'the quiet and commonplace, where nothing 'happened' and yet all was contained and immanent.' The show is arranged thematically, under the headings 'Informality,' 'Near/Far,' 'Disbelief,' 'Working People,' 'Extraction,' 'Assembly,' and 'Dialogues.' The abstractness of the groupings underscores how the images are anything but abstract. 'Dialogues' deserves special mention. It consists of the work of those other photographers, including Ernest Cole, Jo Ractcliffe, and Santu Mofokeng. The section comes midway through the show, a nice placement and indicative of the care devoted to the retrospective, jointly put together by YUAG, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Fundación MAPFRE,, in Madrid. Advertisement Other than 'Extraction,' about mining (Goldblatt's first photographic job was working for South Africa's largest mining operation, Anglo-American Corporation), the categories are usefully elastic. They organize but don't confine. That's appropriate, as confinement registers throughout the show in other ways: not just in the innumerable restrictions on Black South Africans evident in so many of the photographs but also the way Goldblatt captures space. David Goldblatt, "Tailings dump after reclamation, Owendale Asbestos Mine, Northern Cape, 24 December 2007." Yale University Art Gallery Part of the fascination of the show is seeing how little Goldblatt owes to other photographers. Artistically, he's very much his own man. His photographs of Afrikaner farmers have drawn comparisons to Walker Evans's of Southern tenant farmers. Actually, all they have in common is arduous agriculture (endured by the subjects) and human sympathy (extended by the photographers). Maybe that's another reason Goldblatt doesn't have the fame he deserves: He doesn't constellate, and constellations can make the work of art historians, curators and, yes, reviewers, far easier. David Goldblatt, "Wedding party, Orlando West," 1970. Yale University Art Gallery In that treatment of space, though, one does see an affinity, and it's thrilling, with Robert Frank. Frank's 'The Americans' is less about the people in his photographs than the space that contains them. Something similar is going on in Goldblatt's images, his rural ones especially. The land and sky — the amazing, pitiless South African sky — take on an eloquence to rival that of the faces of the people Goldblatt photographs, and that is eloquence of a very high order. Advertisement These photographs are in no way modest — excellence, always, is its own, justified, immodesty — but the photographer is. 'I let my subjects place themselves and I try to photograph quite literally what is in front of the camera,' Goldblatt said in 1974. 'You could call it a quality of deliberate accident.' David Goldblatt, "Sunday morning: A not-white family living illegally in the 'White' group area of Hillbrow, Johannesburg," 1978. Yale University Art Gallery That personal modesty, which is to say an absence of self-importance, extends to an absence of self-righteousness. 'Over time, it grew evident that the real conflict was … how to square one's conscience with being white in this country. This was not hair-splitting. It was a moral dilemma that arose in numerous ways in daily life.' That numerousness is seen throughout the show, and that dilemma felt throughout it. Bearing witness does not mean preaching or making judgments, except, it may be, of oneself. David Goldblatt, "Wait-a-Minute Photographer, Braamfontein, Johannesburg," 1955. Yale University Art Gallery Goldblatt's work has a fundamental visual simplicity, even to the point of austerity. This helps contain the emotional power of so many of the images while also deepening it. Injustice and pain and exploitation when presented as INJUSTICE and PAIN and EXPLOITATION are announcements, and announcements are quickly moved on from. Goldblatt offers simple declarative sentences, not that there's anything simple about them. Emphasizing the significance of description and documentation are the increasingly long titles Goldblatt gave his photographs. That's part of the deliberateness of the accident. Mark Klett, "Storm Clouds Moving Fast, One Hour." Yale University Art Gallery YUAG has a nice surprise for visitors, since 'Photography and the Botanical World' isn't listed on the gallery website. It's a terrific little show, with more than 40 photographs of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It runs through June 8. Advertisement As one might expect with such subject matter, there are photographs from Karl Blossfeldt, Imogen Cunningham, and Anna Atkins, as well as André Kertész's Goldblatt's here, too, with an agave so large the frame crops its leaves (another instance of confinement). He offers the picture as an homage to the Mexican master Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Such a tribute is a reminder that bearing witness can have another, happier aspect: offering praise. DAVID GOLDBLATT: NO ULTERIOR MOTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BOTANICAL WORLD At Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, through June 22 and June 8, respectively. Mark Feeney can be reached at
