Goodman Gallery is pleased to present, Markers of Presence, an exhibition of colour photographs by David Goldblatt. In the late 1990s Goldblatt began exploring the use of colour in his personal photography. Prompted by a new political dispensation in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as technical advances in digital reproduction, Goldblatt felt that colour best captured his feelings about the time.
Goldblatt’s colour photographs are collected under a wide-ranging essay, Intersections, a body of work made between 2001 to 2012, subsequently published as Regarding Intersections and Intersections Intersected. This work included explorations of land and landscape, people, towns and monuments - all held together by Goldblatt’s fundamental interest in our values as a society, and how we express those values in the marks we make and leave behind. Markers of Presence presents a cross-section of photographs from Intersections. In light of the searching spirit that preoccupied Goldblatt during this period, the exhibition brings together five currents that underpin the series.
i. Fuck All Landscapes
Driving across South Africa in a kitted-out campervan, Goldblatt describes the landscape as “deep, bland, vast and seemingly featureless.” He wrote that “precisely in these qualities is a presence that is difficult to hold or suggest in photographs. As soon as you try to bring what is before you into some sort of visual coherence, it eludes, it seems to move away. There seems no focal point, no way of coherently containing it. Often it is what I call a ‘fuck all’ landscape. Somehow one has to find ways of being true to what is there and yet bringing it fully to the page or print.” (Regarding Intersections, 2014)
On the farm Frenda, near Warden, Free State (4 May 2002) speaks to this predicament - one that Goldblatt confronted and embraced in succeeding photographs of the Highveld and Greater Karoo. There is nowhere for the eye to go, no centre to hold. There is something to be sensed, a narrative or feeling that could reveal itself to those who are willing to look.
ii. Fences
“I don’t see a farmer’s fence so much as an intrusion as man’s way of being in the landscape. It seems a necessary way of adapting himself to the land and the land to him.” (David Goldblatt, Regarding Intersections, 2014)
Many of Goldblatt’s colour photographs contain markers of human presence: roads, fences, telephone poles, farm gates and road signs. Yet, as Goldblatt wrote “I don’t think that I actively look for some marker in the landscape, I look rather for landscapes in which these aspects have come together in some way that has integrity about it.” (Regarding Intersections, 2014) The presence of fences that traverse the landscape, as seen in Uitkyk, Bushmanland (27 June 2004), are also in Goldblatt’s view, symbolic of the division and possession of land in South Africa.
iii. Possession and Dispossession
The centrality of land ownership and dispossession to South Africa’s history and present permeate the images from Intersections through Goldblatt’s oblique way of looking. Johnny Basson, goatherd, Rooipad se Vlak, Pella, Northern Cape (2004) features a member of the swerwer community, people Goldblatt often encountered on the road. Goldblatt wrote, “the swerwers are by nature nomads, preferring to be on the move. But where their ancestors roamed territory freely, as hunters and pastoralists, the swerwers are confined to the spaces between farm fences and roads.” (Regarding Intersections, 2014)
iv. Mortality and Memory
In the Time of Aids is a grouping of photographs Goldblatt made within Intersections. As he drove around the country during the time when the AIDS epidemic was seldom discussed openly, and actively denied by some leaders in the South African government, he looked for signs that people made in their landscapes that spoke of the crisis. Entrance to Lategan’s Truck Inn, In the time of Aids, Laingsburg (14 November 2004) depicts a circular arrangement of debris and metal drums on the side of a road. To the right of the koppie in the background is a pole with the AIDs ribbon attached to it - a barely visible reminder of the epidemic.
Artworks
Create a Goodman Gallery account to view pricing of available artworks and access purchasing.
V. Multiple Views
Willem Voster with friends, family, home and garden, Merweville (2 March 2009), devised as a triptych, sees Goldblatt photograph Willem Vorster’s property within and then outside the fence, looking back at the place he had just stood. Goldblatt brings his position within the photographic frame to the fore and presents different perspectives through which he might compose an image. This gives the viewer an awareness of Goldblatt’s presence in the scene and his relationship to the subject.
A poem by Maneo Mohale, titled the names, written in response to the exhibition is available to visitors.
Markers of Place is taken from the title of an essay by Michael Stevenson, written for Regarding Intersections.
Artist Bio
David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018. Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during the time of Apartheid. Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era monuments and buildings with the idea that the architecture reveals something about the people who built them.
In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. Equal parts artist and documentarian, Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs.
In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2001, a retrospective of his work, 'David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years' began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. A more recent retrospective includes, 'David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at the AIC' (2018), which is now touring. This major traveling retrospective exhibition spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography.
Goldblatt was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.
Other notable group exhibitions and biennales include: ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, South Africa in Apartheid and After, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Centre, London (2012). He also exhibited at the Jewish Museum (2010); and the New Museum (2009), both in New York.
Selected key collections include: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty; Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
