David Goldblatt

📷David Goldblatt (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid.

Goldblatt began photographing when he was a teenager.  In 1963 he 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 the 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." 

After apartheid, Goldblatt continued to photograph within South Africa, particularly its landscapes.

In the work Goldblatt created during apartheid he never photographed in color. Goldblatt observed that: "the use of color during apartheid would have been inappropriate. It would have enhanced the beautiful and the personal, whereas black and white photographs to more effectively documented the external dramatic contradictions that defined this earlier period."

In the 1990s he began working in color, in a sense adapting to the digital age. "I’ve found the venture into color quite exciting… largely because new technology has enabled me to work with color on the computer as I have done with black and white in the darkroom.” 

Goldblatt died on 25 June 2018 in Johannesburg from cancer. He had created photographs up until his death.

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