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30/5/2005

David Goldblatt

Galeria Elba Benitez, Madrid

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (Randfontein, 1930) has a special place in the history of photography and photojournalism. His work, witness to the upheavals in South Africa over the last five decades, has allusively documented the country’s changing political and social landscape. David Goldblatt has explored the connections between the land, its people and their values in his portrayal of the anonymous characters and places that have shaped the history and values of the country and his own life too. His work has won international acclaim and has been exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani of Barcelona, the MOMA in New York and at the Documenta XI in Kassel. In June 2005, his work will be the subject of a major show at the Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf. The Galería Elba Benítez, as part of PHEO5, now presents a selection of his works in black-and-white as well as his newest pieces in colour.

David Goldblatt began taking photographs at the beginning of the 50s, attracted by the pictures he saw in magazines like Life, Look, Picture Post and Drum and by the work of Capa, Cartier Bresson, Bill Brandt and Walker Evans. In 1962, he decided to sell the family business in order to devote all his energies to photography. His early career as a photographer is associated to a number of English magazines. However, Goldblatt would abandon the more blatantly political style he had employed in his early work, for an approach that would come to characterise his subsequent work. The artist explains how at the beginning of his career he felt the need to reflect the events –the advent and consolidation of apartheid– that were taking place in his country. It was in the 60s, however, when he took up photography professionally, that he rejected the idea of being a camera-toting “missionary” who used the lens to faithfully reflect events, and began instead to depict the circumstances, the values and the climate of the country, seldom dealing directly with the big news stories of the moment. In this manner, and thanks too to the years he had spent working at the family shop –the son of Jewish emigrants of Lithuanian descent, Goldblatt’s family ran a business many of whose customers consisted of Afrikaners of humble origins– David Goldblatt began a series of photographs of Afrikaners. The controversy that greeted the series, which ran into the opposition of many Afrikaners who supported the apartheid regime, would be only the first of many in the artist’s career. The main features of Goldblatt’s work are already contained in that first work; the artist presents a complex view of the “Afrikaners”: in one hand they were responsible for the ideological development of apartheid and on the other, many were likeable people. Another project of that time was “On the Mines”, published in 1973, together with text by Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer. Once again, in this work Goldblatt portrays the social and economic realities of South Africa, but this time he concentrates on an aspect closely associated with his childhood and youth: the goldmines. The city of Randfontein, where Goldblatt grew up, was surrounded by gold mines. In the 70s and 80s, he continued to photograph South African society particularly in portraits taken on the streets and in the homes of the townships and the suburbs of Johannesburg. In 1979-1980 he explored life in Boksburg, a small, white, middle-class community, which was similar in many ways to Randfontein. In the 80s, the harshest, most brutal years of apartheid, Goldblatt worked on the series “South Africa: The Structure of Things Then” which he completed in 1998, with the publication of a book, under the same title, and a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art of New York. “Our structures often declare quite nakedly, yet eloquently, what manner of people they were who built them and what they stood for. There was – is- a rawness to the forces at work here that is evidenced in much of we have built”. In 1999, when he at last emerged from fifteen years of work on the Structures series Goldblatt found a new country: a post-apartheid South Africa. At this point, and for the very first time, Goldblatt began to use colour in his personal photographs.

The Galería Elba Benítez presents the first Goldblatt's solo show of to be held at a private space in Spain. For this occasion, a selection of his black-and-white works, made between 1952 and 2000 and his newest colour pieces is on display. Goldblatt found in the South African literature the source of the content of his work. Rather than in its history, Goldblatt has always been interested in reflecting the values, desires, needs and beliefs of South African society. He formally materialized it with a subtle economy of narrative means and illustrate it with black and white images from ordinary people, their homes, families, boroughs, buildings or places of work. In 1999, Goldblatt was to discover a new, post-apartheid South Africa: a South Africa in which the cities had been consumed by chaos and disorder. The upheavals affecting society and city-planning would now become the main focus of Goldblatt’s portraits. In contrast to the technical precision with which Goldblatt treats light and focus in his black-and-white work, for these new colour pieces he chose to adopt a freer, more improvised technique better attuned to the new times stirring the country. This new approach can be seen in works such as “Pavement sale on Jeppe Street, Johannesburg 10 August 2002” and “Braiding hair on Bree Street, Johannesburg 7 September 2002” in which Goldblatt examines street markets. Other works on display at the Galería Elba Benítez include a series of diptychs in which he portrays black, working men who, in their efforts to become an integral part of the fabric of the new social and economic system. Lastly, in the “Municipalities” series, Goldblatt has made a veritable portrait gallery of the new civil servants who work for the current, post-apartheid political system. In it we see a civil service that would have been inconceivable fifteen years ago in a country that barred black people from holding public posts.

International acclaim for David Goldblatt’s work is mirrored by the numerous international exhibitions he has enjoyed. David Goldblatt will be given a major one-man show next June at the Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf. Other key solo shows to date include an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MOMA) in 1998, and the retrospective exhibition ”Fifty one years”, organized in 2002 by the Museu d’Art Contemporani of Barcelona (MACBA), which later toured to the Witte de With Museum in Rotterdam, 2002, Centro Cultural Belem, 2002, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 2003, Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, 2003, Lenbachhaus in Munich 2003 and which will be shown at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2005. He has also participated in important group exhibitions such as the recent “History, Memory, Society”, at the Tate Modern in London, alongside photographers Henri Cartier Bresson and Lee Friedlander, as well as in “Documenta XI” in Kassel, 2002, and in the show “In/sight, African Photographers, 1940 to the present” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, 1996. His work forms part of major public collections such as the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Museum of Modern Art of New York. Photographs by the artist are reproduced in numerous books and catalogues (see attached bibliography).

Opening: Tuesday 31st May, 2005

Image: Pavement sale on Jeppe Street, Johannesburg. 10 August 2002

For more information: Pia Ogea, email: piaogea@elbabenitez.com

Galeria Elba Benitez
San Lorenzo, 11 Madrid
Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday from 11.00 to 14.00 and from 16.30 to 20.30

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