This is an unprecedented moment at which to absorb the extraordinary oeuvre of South Africa’s greatest documentary photographer, David Goldblatt. A massive retrospective is hanging in the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), while a show of his most recent work, accompanied by a book, has just opened at the Goodman Gallery.
Intersections is the title of the Goodman show and the book. The idea began with Goldblatt wondering what was to be seen at various points of latitude/longitude intersection across South Africa, but soon developed a more metaphorical bent. Under the overall rubric of Intersections, there are sub-sections: Jo’burg, Aids, Monuments, Asbestos and others. The intersections they record are those of humanity and landscape, the old apartheid city and its new occupants, past and present, or, as Goldblatt puts it, “ideas, values, ethics, postures, people and things”.
The first, most obvious, thing to be said about this more recent body of work is that it is in colour. From his earliest attempts at professional photography in the late 1940s until the early 1990s, Goldblatt used no colour in his “personal” (as opposed to his “commercial”) photography. Colour was too pretty, too seductive, for the old South Africa — a place, after all, defined by the difference between black and white.
And, as you can see at the JAG show, once Goldblatt had accepted and begun to work with the harsh Highveld light, he was able to develop a host of delicate nuances from that stark vision. Always, though, and despite his opposition to apartheid, there is a subtlety to Goldblatt that sidesteps the activist idiom of those years. He was always interested in subtleties, in Particulars, as one series from the mid-1970s is called.
These pictures home in on body parts, on hands and legs and feet, but also on the close-up textures of skin, fabric and grass. They still speak of black and white, in racial terms, but they also try to winkle out the small, almost anonymous things that paradoxically give life to individuals.
The Intersections pictures, by comparison, seem to step back rather than home in. They are printed very large, and that’s a good thing: in one pair of pictures I particularly like (Sheep Farm at Oubip, between Aggeneys and Loop 10, Bushmanland, Northern Cape. June 5 2004), I didn’t even see the sheep in question when I looked at the book.
In fact, the work’s title or caption (more the latter than the former — they tend to be flatly descriptive) was different at the show. The word “farm” had been omitted, and that little change makes it just a bit more likely that the viewer will actually look for the sheep, well camouflaged as they are, way in the distance.
The landscapes in the Intersections group, particularly (though they are not the whole of the group), are Goldblatt at his most subtle. They avoid an obvious composition, or appear entirely uncomposed; there is no clear focal point. They ask you to medi-tate on texture and space rather than be taken by a more immediately arresting composition.
This strategy relates to the way the early white travellers saw the inner landscapes of South Africa, especially the Karoo, or, rather, how they didn’t see it. They complained that these landscapes were featureless, that there was nothing for the eye to alight upon. It’s not a long way from there to finding such landscapes void of life, uninhabited, unpeopled. Hence the colonial idea that they weren’t really stealing the land from anyone; it was empty, up for grabs.
Goldblatt’s landscapes query that idea. The traces of human activity on the land are noted. They may be barely visible, or may almost have been absorbed into the landscape itself (like the sheep), but they are there.
It was Goldblatt himself, at the Goodman opening, who pointed out the sheep to me. He was describing how he took the picture, how this apparently blank landscape was not just a random sample of nowhere, as it might appear, but a carefully chosen image — one that was, moreover, hard to capture.
I laughed at this because, when the Mail & Guardian was sent the Intersections book, we were told we could use any picture we liked as long as we gave the full title. That seemed of a piece with the punctilious documentarist whose pictures record, however obliquely, very specific moments in our social history. It seemed right for a photographer whose captions sternly give you precise information about when and where, as if to back away from any notion that they are art for art’s sake, or simply beautiful.
When I asked, Goldblatt chuckled and said he’d simply changed the title. A small thing, perhaps, but there speaks the consummate artist, driven not so much by the big social forces as by the small promptings of his eye and his thought. It’s in the detail; it’s about seeing the things that almost aren’t there at all.
Intersections is published by Prestel. Intersections runs at the Goodman Gallery until October 1 and David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years, a Retrospective Exhibition, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until October 31