At Kevin Kwanele’s Takwaito Barber, Lansdowne Road. Khayelitsha, Cape Town in the time of AIDS.
16 May 2007
Archival pigment ink digitally printed on cotton rag paper
Paper size: 112 x 137.5cm
Image size: 99 x 127cm
Edition of 10
David Goldblatt’s photographs of the last decade are an ongoing exploration of the intersections between people, values and land in post-apartheid South Africa. They develop and take into new terrain the approach underlying much of his work in the years of apartheid, work which culminated in his monumental South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (published by Oxford, 1998). This series was exhibited at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1998.
In his upcoming solo show, Intersections Intersected, at Michael Stevenson in January/February 2008, photographs from various essays undertaken in the years of apartheid have been paired with photographs from his post-apartheid work. The resulting many-layered dynamic might be regarded as a meditation on continuity and change in South Africa. It also clearly reveals the connectedness of vision and thought that runs through all of Goldblatt’s work – early and recent, black-and-white and colour.
Structures, a focus of Goldblatt’s photography, continue to be embedded with the values and ideologies of their makers, and this is most clearly evident in monuments, memorials and places of worship. In South Africa many of these structures are interesting in their awkwardness. As Goldblatt articulates:
South Africa is not a society in which expression has been muted by obfuscating encrustations of centuries of art and refinement. Even when we attempt symbolism it has the quality of clumsy transparency rather than dissimulation. Our structures often declare quite nakedly, yet eloquently, what manner of people built them, and what they stood for. There was – and is – a rawness to the forces at work here that is evidenced in much of what we have built.’ (South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, p11)
Goldblatt concludes his introduction to South Africa: The Structure of Things Then by looking forward: ‘We are in a new time. What its values and spirit will be and how these will be expressed and evidenced in the structures brought forth has hardly begun to emerge’ (p20). In his colour work of recent years Goldblatt witnesses the shifts in power and changing perceptions of history that have emerged and continue to manifest themselves through structures, some neglected, some reconfigured, and some newly constructed.
In this juxtaposition, a recent image taken in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, from Goldblatt’s In the time of AIDS series is paired with an image of the Cross Roads People’s Park in a township in the former Transvaal in 1986. Both these photographs reflect on struggles – then against apartheid and now against AIDS – and symbols of hope. The peace parks were among the very few structures to emerge spontaneously during the years of apartheid as popular expressions of resistance and hope, and the AIDS ribbon, which has permeated all aspects of our landscape, remains a quiet reminder of an awareness and consciousness of a struggle that has yet to be won. (See South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, pp 200, 240.)
Goldblatt’s work was included on Documenta 12 (as well as the previous Documenta 11 in 2002). His show that accompanied the Hasselblad Award in 2006 has toured in Scandinavia over the past year, and the retrospective exhibition curated by Martin Parr for Arles in 2006 travelled to the Forma centre for photography in Milan and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.