David GoldblattDancing-master Ted van Rensburg watches two of his ballroom pupils, swinging to a record of Victor Sylvester and his Orchestra, in the MOTHS' Hall at the old Court House, Boksburg, 1980
David Goldblatt’s photographic series ‘Boksburg’ was captured between 1979 and1980 in a predominantly white, middle-class suburb east of Johannesburg during apartheid, and forms a critical chapter in his exploration of everyday segregation. Rather than focusing on protest or state violence, Goldblatt turned his lens toward banal suburban scenes – residents mowing lawns, attending school events or church services, shopping in malls – scenes that appear innocuous yet are deeply structured by racial hierarchy. The apparent normality of these scenes belies the moral dissonance of lives lived under apartheid, revealing Goldblatt’s conviction that “ordinary, moral, upright” people could nonetheless participate in an extremist and oppressive system .
Throughout ‘Boksburg’, his photographs are composed in a dispassionate, observational style that avoids sensationalism and judgement. Each carefully framed image holds subtle contradictions: white respectability and ritual, the marginalised presence of Black domestic workers, the architecture of exclusion embodied in fences and spatial separations. He called his method “a neutral optical effect” intended to hold up a mirror to viewers, compelling them to confront how complicity is embedded in the ordinary. In this way ‘Boksburg’ stands as a probing inquiry into the mechanisms by which segregation was normalised, offering a powerful and haunting portrait of the social and psychological landscapes that sustained apartheid.
