David Goldblatt in "Johannesburg" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

DAVID GOLDBLATT: The camera is a very strange instrument.

It demands first of all, that you see coherently,

it makes it possible for you to enter into
worlds, and places, and associations,

that would otherwise be very difficult to do.

Being a photographer is a wonderful thing, really.

I'm not tied to any place.

I can go and come as I like.

It's wonderful.

My childhood years in Johannesburg were very
happy.

We enjoyed an enormous amount of freedom.

We would ride our bicycles all over the Randfontein Estates, which was the goldmine around the town,

and we could explore the mines to a
great degree.

It's a brutal landscape, it's very bare, bleak,
we don't have a sea, we don’t have a big river.

We just had these rather dull and uninteresting spaces.

I think there was a kind of osmosis taking
place in me,

I became organically related to the place.

On the one hand, I want to photograph the land.

Land, in a very broad sense.

On the other hand, I'm fascinated by our structures
as declarations of value.

I'm too late for this photograph, the trees
are already in leaf.

I’m going to try.

Let's have a look.

It seems to me that the style of architecture
that is emerging to the north of Johannesburg,

is a kind of an aggressive materialism.

In this country, because of the nakedness,
almost, of the struggles that took place between

black and white,

the structures that emerged were amazingly
clear demonstrations of value systems.

White Afrikaner Protestant churches are those
that I think of particularly.

Their churches had these huge windows and
this mega phonic structure,

come the 1970s the forces of liberation are
coming down to South Africa,

increasingly impinging on Afrikaners.

So, their new churches become defensive.

There are very few of them built with piercings
in the outer walls.

Public structures become clear manifestations
to self-image.

Look at this, look at this, huge building,
but at least this has got a certain amount

of movement.

That’s a Hasselblad.

Famous, very expensive, beautifully built box.

My brother Dan would come back from somewhere
in the world and bring little miniature cameras.

He brought back from one of his voyages a
Contax camera.

The Contax was the Zeiss equivalent of the
Leica.

It was a great camera, but this particular
one had been severely damaged.

I don't know what its history was during the
war, but when it eventually reached Randfontein,

it was a very sick camera, but I tried to
do some photography with it.

When I matriculated in '48, I certainly had
a strong wish to become a magazine photographer.

“Life” and “Look from America,” “Picture
Post” from England were the

window on the world for millions.

In 1952, I think it was, the apartheid government
had begun to put its ideology in place and

one of the first steps was to separate the
races in public amenities.

I did a short strip of film of a black man
going up and then being turned back by a black policeman.

He had been accustomed to taking that route
into the Johannesburg railway station and

suddenly he was not allowed to.

So I sent a strip of those photographs to
“Picture Post” to the editor.

I was politely rejected.

I tried to do a magazine story about the men
who worked on top of the mine dumps around

our town.

These men worked right through the year, every
day and night,

no matter what the conditions, dealing with
the waste of the milling operation.

We were subjecting these men to a terrible
existence.

It is freezing cold on the top of those dumps
in winter.

Here's an old dump.

It's been covered in grass to keep down the dust.

Black miners could not rise beyond the level
of what were known as boss boys or team leaders.

Of course, they were not boys, they were men.

In order to rise above that level, you had
to have a blasting certificate,

and this was a method that was used by the
white trade unions to ensure that

only whites could go into the upper echelons
of the mining hierarchy.

If one wanted to look at this society,

you had to grasp the nature of white Afrikaner
life and ideology.

The Afrikaners were descended from the Dutch
and French Huguenot, and German, Scotch, early,

early settlers in this country.

Small as that group was, they determined a
great deal of what happened here.

For them, their conquest of the tribes that
they encountered were guided by God, the ineffable.

This became something that I had to deal with
as I saw it in a way that hadn't been done before.

During the 1930s, the right wing of Afrikaner
movement known as the Ossewabrandwag was anti-Jewish.

Like many of my fellow Jewish friends,

I had a fear of Afrikaners from my childhood
and yet felt the need to explore this.

These people really absorbed me.

They frightened me in their depths of the
fear of black people,

and yet at the same time their ease with them.

I would be photographing an elderly couple
on one of these plots

and a little black girl would walk into the
parlor, sucking her thumb

and just stand there watching me work and
they would not say a word to her.

They didn't object and tell her to get out.

It was just accepted that she would come in
and do that.

A common response from potential publishers
was “where's the apartheid?”

To me, it was embedded deep, deep, deep in
the grain of those photographs.

People overseas simply didn't grasp these
extraordinary contradictions in our life.

I was not interested in trying to explain
things to them.

We're heading into the center of Boksburg.

I photographed here in the winter of ‘79
and again in ‘80.

Instead of traveling the country and photographing
whites generally,

I wanted to concentrate on this one community
and regard it as a microcosm of

white middle class life in South Africa

and that's what I did.

This entire town was reserved for whites.

Black people came here only if they had the
right paper, a pass.

I began to look at these crowds waiting at
traffic lights to cross the road and found

them remarkably exposing of us.

Corner of Commissioner and Eloff.

Oh, we must go up one block.

This picture here was taken from where I'm
standing now, of that shop there,

and I was probably standing here when I took
this picture.

I was excited by this winter light that we
have, it’s very sharp and low angled.

These low buildings were to me, the quintessence
of the world that I knew and grew up in.

There's nothing distinctive about them.

I don't think there is a single picture in
that whole collection in which the subject

is looking at the camera or me.

I wanted to disappear from the equation.

In Soweto and Hillbrow, the photographs were
encounters between myself and the subject.

Instead of trying to photograph life as an
ongoing process.

I elected to photograph people as they were
in a formal way.

I was always insistent that the subject would
look at me, not at the camera.

In doing those portraits.,

I became aware of people's bodies in a very
emphatic way.

Arms, and limbs, breasts, hips, necks, particulars.

Here is a whole drawer of four by fives.

On my death, my negatives, my contact prints,
and my working prints, would have gone to

the University of Cape Town

where they had established an archival facility
for this purpose.

But after the burning of paintings and the
burning of some photographs by the students

in the university art collection,

the university appointed a committee of academics
and students to examine every piece of art

with a view to deciding

whether to pulling out or covering up any
artwork that they regarded as potentially

offensive to black students.

Well, I can't accept that kind of valuation
and interference in the freedom of expression.

If there are pieces of work in the art collection
that perhaps make other people uncomfortable,

then let’s exhibit them, hold debates.

I regard my work as one thing that I will
not allow to be compromised,

and I compromise every day,

just by drawing breath in this country.

But today under a democracy, I refuse to be
complicit.

I canceled my contract.

And my stuff won't go to the University of
Cape Town.

I don't think I've ever been bored with photography.

I have sometimes become extremely frustrated

Ahh [bleeped].

Disgusted.

Look at this.

Look at this.

but it's a life absorbing process.

It absorbs me fully.

I've changed my mind about photographs 25,
30 years after I've taken them.

My problem is that I don't have 25 or 30 years
to make up my mind now.

I've got to make up my mind much sooner.

I was doing photographs of the goldmines,

and I saw a reflection of myself,

so I just snapped it.