David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (born November 29 1930) is a South African photographer who was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province.

Goldblatt began photographing in 1948 and has documented developments in South Africa through the period of Apartheid to the present. He has numerous publications to his name and is held in high esteem, both locally and internationally. His book, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, published in 1998, offers an in-depth visual analysis of the relationship between South Africa’s structures and the forces that shaped them, from the country’s early colonial beginnings up until 1990. Despite the fact that his work is held in major museum collections worldwide and a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, interest in Goldblatt’s work increased significantly after the eleventh Documenta (Kassel, 2002), as well as a travelling exhibition of 51 years of his work (Barcelona, 2001). At Documenta two projects were shown: black-and white work depicting life in the middle-class white community of Boksburg in the 1970s and '80s, as well as examples of later colour work from the series Johannesburg Intersections. The comprehensive retrospective of his work, which opened in the AXA Gallery in New York in 2001, offered an overview of Goldblatt’s photographic oeuvre from 1948–1999.

Until the end of the 1990s Goldblatt – in what he calls his personal work – rarely photographed in colour. It was only after working on a project involving blue asbestos in north-western Australia that his interest in photographing in colour increased. This was coupled with new developments in the field of digital scanning and printing. Only when Goldblatt was able to achieve the same “depth” in his colour work that he had previously achieved in his black-and-white photographs, did he choose to explore this field extensively. The result is a fascinating blend of Goldblatt’s expertise in the field of classic large-format photography combined with the latest techniques offered by high-end scanners and advanced ink-jet papers, producing images redolent of South Africa’s light and land.

David Goldblatt lives in Johannesburg.

Solo Exhibitions

• 1974 - Photographers' Gallery, London
• 1975 - National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
• 1975 - Photography Place, Sydney
• 1977 - Durban Art Gallery, Durban, South Africa
• 1978 - Market Theatre Galleries, Johannesburg (et al.)
• 1983 - Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg
• 1983 - Pretoria Art Gallery, Pretoria
• 1983 - SA National Gallery, Cape Town
• 1985 - Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
• 1986 - Photographers' Gallery, London
• 1998 - The Museum of Modern Art, New York;
  • Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam
• 1999 - South African National Gallery, Cape Town
• 2001 - Galerie Krings-Ernst, Cologne
• 2001-2005 - David Goldblatt - Fifty-One Years. Axa Gallery, New York;
  • MACBA Barcelona (organizer);
  • Witte de With, Rotterdam;
  • Centro Cultural de Belem-Fundacao, Lisbon;
  • Modern Art, Oxford;
  • Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels;
  • Lenbachhaus, Munich;
  • Johannesburg Art Gallery
• 2002 - Galerie Krings-Ernst, Cologne
• 2004 - Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris
• 2005 - Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid
  • David Goldblatt – Intersections. museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf;
  • Camera Austria, Graz
• 2006 - Rencontres d'Arles, Eglise Sainte-Anne, Arles
  • Hasselblad Center, Göteborg
• 2007 - David Goldblatt – Intersections. Huis Marseille, Amsterdam;
  • Berkeley Art Museum
• 2007 - D. G. - Südafrikanische Fotografien 1952 - 2000. Fotomuseum Winterthur

Group Shows

• 1986 - South Africa: the Cordoned Heart, South Africa and the USA
• 1995 - 1. Johannesburg Biennial, Johannesburg
• 1996 - Contemporary Art from South Africa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
• 1996 - In/Sight, African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, Guggenheim Museum, New York
• 1998 - Blank_ Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam and Berlin
• 2000 - Home. Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
  • Rhizomes of Memory, Three South African Photographers, with George Hallett and Santu Mofokeng. Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo
  • Eye-Africa, Revue Noir, Cape Town, Europe and the USA
• 2001 - The Short Century - Befreiungsbewegungen in Afrika. Villa Stuck, Munich;
  • Haus der Kulturen der Welt im Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin;
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
  • P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
  • Head North. Bildmuseet, Umeå
• 2002 - documenta 11, Kassel
  • Shock. Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
• 2003 - Strangers: the first ICP triennial of photography and video International Center of Photography, New York, NY
• 2004 - Citigroup Photography Prize 2004. The Photographers’ Gallery, London;
  • museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf
  • Fotografie aus Südafrika. Galerie Christine König, Vienna
  • History, Memory, Society, withHenri Cartier Bresson and Lee Friedlander. Tate Modern, London, 2004
  • Eye Spy: Photography from the Permanent Collection. MCASD Downtown, San Diego, USA
  • Faces in the Crowd - Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London;
  • Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Castello Di Rivoli, Turin
  • 8 South African photographers. Det Nationale Fotomuseum, Copenhagen
• 2004-2006 - Afrika Remix. Zeitgenössische Kunst eines Kontinents. museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf;
  • Hayward Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Books

• On The Mines. With Nadine Gordimer. Cape Town 1973
• Some Afrikaners Photographed. Johannesburg 1975
• Cape Dutch Homesteads. With Margaret Courtney-Clark and John Kench. Cape Town 1981
• In Boksburg. Cape Town 1982
• Lifetimes: Under Apartheid. With Nadine Gordimer. New York 1986
• The Transported of KwaNdebele. With Brenda Goldblatt and Phillip van Niekerk. New York 1989
• South Africa: the Structure of Things Then. Cape Town; New York 1998
• Lesley Lawson: David Goldblatt. London 2001 (Phaidon 55)
• David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years. Barcelona 2001
• Particulars. Johannesburg 2003 (“Prix du Livre ”, XVIe Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Arles 2004)
• David Goldblatt – Intersections. Munich et al. 2005
• David Goldblatt: Photographs: Hasselblad Award 2006, ISBN 3775719172

Works in Public Collections

• museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf
• Durban Art Gallery
• Johannesburg Art Gallery
• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
• South African National Gallery, Cape Town
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
• FNAC, Paris
• University of South Africa, Pretoria

Honours

• 1987 - Hallmark Fellow at the Aspen Conference in Design, Aspen, Colorado
• 1992 - Gahan Fellow in Photography at Harvard University
• 1995 - Camera Austria Prize
• 2001 - Honorary Doctor in Fine Arts, University of Cape Town
• 2006 - Hasselblad Award - Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.