David Goldblatt HonFRPS (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." He has numerous publications to his name.
Early life
Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province, and was the youngest of the three sons of Eli and Olga Goldblatt. His grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania around 1893, having fled the persecution of Jews there.
Goldblatt's father ran a clothing store, where his mother worked as a typist for a clothing company, which Goldblatt speculated may have been how they met. Goldblatt attended Krugersdorp High School, and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a degree in commerce.
Photography
Goldblatt began photographing when he was a teenager. He got his first camera from his father, who bought it from Goldblatt's brother, who had brought home a damaged German Contax camera when he came back from serving in World War II. Though his first photographs were not groundbreaking, he enlisted help from a wedding photographer: "He would drape several cameras around my neck so that I looked very professional, and my job was to ensure that no guest with a good camera got a good picture . . . I would have to bump or walk in front of them at the critical moment so that my boss was the only person who ended up with good photographs.” A couple years later in 1963, as his skill developed, he sold the clothing shop that he had taken over on the death of his father in 1962, and became a full-time photographer. He documented developments in South Africa through the period of apartheid until it ended in the 1990s. However he was still making photographs up until his death in 2018.
Throughout his years as a photographer, Goldblatt never saw himself as an artist, and he was uncomfortable being seen as one. Many agree that he was a documentarian more than he was an artist. Goldblatt had an innovative approach to documentary photography. He made a life of photographing the issues that went beyond the events of apartheid and documented the conditions that led to them. Goldblatt was never comfortable with the fine art world. He went to exhibition openings but secretly hated the attention they threw upon him. He got around the label of artist by simply calling himself a photographer. He said: "I am a self-appointed observer and critic of the society into which I was born, with a tendency to giving recognition to what is overlooked or unseen."
Goldblatt's photography was not obviously politically charged. He claimed he was not an activist, unlike the majority of his friends and other photographers during this time. He in turn was looked down upon and disrespected for not involving himself in activism, on which he commented: "I wasn't prepared to compromise what I regarded as my particular needs." Instead of producing photographs which might "attempt to pass judgment," Goldblatt chose to "show the complexity of a situation."
Depictions of the everyday are frequent in Goldblatt's work. Instead of photographing the explicit violence of Apartheid South Africa, he preferred to document the violence of this era which exhibited itself in ordinary life: "I shun violence. And I wouldn't know how to handle it if I was a photographer in a violent scene."
During Apartheid, Goldblatt in his work The Transported of KwaNdebele documented the excruciatingly long and uncomfortable twice-daily bus journeys of black workers who lived in the segregated "homelands" northeast of Pretoria. The conditions had not changed that much for workers by 2007: "The bulk of people who live there still have to travel to Pretoria by road. It's still a very long commute for them every day – two to eight hours. . . . It will take generations to undo the consequences of Apartheid."