David Goldblatt

The founders of Buffelsjagbaai, a small village on the Southern Cape Atlantic coast, Johannes and Sophia Swam, came there in the 1920s. Shipwrecks and driftwood provided planks from which they built a house and a boat. Scarcity of water was a problem and there were few roads. But in time the community grew. The women would walk to surrounding villages to sell fish which they carried on poles and to buy provisions. Between March and May when the geelbek were running, people would come on donkey carts to buy their catches. Under apartheid the community lacked permanent rights of residence. Today they have electricity, water and security of tenure. They harvest kelp but the fish and the perlemoen (abalone) on which they depend are in decline. 5 October 2005 , 2005

David Goldblatt’s ‘Intersections’ is a major body of colour work produced between 2001 and 2011, marking a notable departure from the black-and-white photography that defined his earlier career. Motivated by the shifting political landscape of post-apartheid South Africa and new possibilities in digital printing, Goldblatt turned to colour to more fully capture the layered and often contradictory realities of the period. The series spans vast landscapes, urban and rural settings, monuments and subtle traces of human presence – subjects united by Goldblatt’s enduring concern with how political and moral values are inscribed in the physical world. While ‘Intersections’ signals a change in both medium and approach, it retains the critical rigour and quiet observational precision that distinguish Goldblatt’s work.

Five themes underpin the ‘Intersections’ series: the elusive presence of “fuck all” landscapes, the visual and symbolic function of fences and boundaries, the persistent histories of possession and dispossession, the quiet aftermath of mortality and memory in the era of HIV/AIDS, and an expanded awareness of photographic perspective. Travelling the country in a campervan, Goldblatt photographed open and often featureless terrain, scenes where human presence was marked not by people but by poles, fences or signage. In so doing, he captured the enduring effects of colonial and apartheid spatial planning, especially regarding land use and ownership. Increasingly, he acknowledged his own position in the act of seeing, presenting multiple viewpoints and inviting reflection on the role of the photographer. Together, these works form a nuanced and expansive visual inquiry into South Africa’s evolving landscapes of power, memory and meaning.