David Goldblatt

To celebrate the publication of On the Mines, a new edition of the acclaimed 1973 book by David Goldblatt, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg is to exhibit a selection of works from the book, and is pleased to host the South African launch of the new version published by Steidl of Germany, noted publisher of books on fine art and photography.

Now in an expanded and redesigned version, the volume is true to the format of the first issue, featuring the original essay by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, and with the images divided into three chapters, namely The Witwatersrand: a Time and Tailings, Shaftsinking, and Mining Men. Gordimer has added a postscript to her essay, and the book is extensively updated “to expand the view but not to alter the sense of things,” says Goldblatt. The photographer has now added a text of his own in which he reflects on his childhood in Randfontein, as well as the 1973 publication. Goldblatt and Gordimer collaborated to examine the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa, and the photographs which are the basis of the book cover a period from the mid-sixties onward. There are now thirty one new, previously unpublished, photographs, including colour images, while eleven pictures from the first edition have been removed. This is to be the first of a planned series of collaborations between David Goldblatt and Steidl to publish both reprints and new books on his work.

The exhibition and book launch are of particular significance at this time in the history of South Africa and its mines. The photographer will be present at the opening of the exhibition, to take part in a public conversation on his work with writer Sean O’Toole, and to sign copies of the new book.

David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, South Africa and since the early 1960s has devoted all of his time to photography. In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, with, he explains “the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid”. In 1998 he was the first South African to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2001. In that same year a retrospective exhibition, David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years, opened in Barcelona, and later travelled to galleries and museums around the world, in New York, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg. His work was represented at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008.
Recent solo exhibitions include those at Marian Goodman Gallery Paris, Goodman Gallery Cape Town and Galeria Elba Benitez in Madrid. His work is currently featured on the exhibition Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, at the Barbican in London. Goldblatt’s photographs are in the collections of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and MoMA New York, among many other prestigious museums. Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad Award and the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, was recently named the 2010 Lucie Award Lifetime Achievement Honoree, and in 2011 received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute.

For further information on the exhibition and new publication, kindly contact the gallery.

The great photographer and portraitist Bill Brandt said, simply: I think a good portrait ought to tell something of the subject’s past and suggest something of his future.
And Evelyn Hofer, who has been called ‘the most famous ‘unknown’ photographer in America’ said: In reality, all we photographers photograph is ourselves in the other… all the time.
These two statements, an ideal and an understanding, offer something approaching a ‘philosophy’ of portraiture to which I subscribe.
- David Goldblatt

In a solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape, titled simply Portraits, photographer David Goldblatt brings together old and new portraits of South Africans taken over the course of his 50-year career. The exhibition includes several commissioned portraits of well-known South African figures never shown before, and a curated selection of photographs spanning the 1960s ‘70s and ‘80s.

Also on show is the series Ex-Offenders, recently shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, in which Goldblatt invites convicted and alleged criminals to revisit the scene of the crime of which they’ve been accused, and to be photographed there. “I wanted to burrow under the statistics,” says Goldblatt, “to meet some of the doers of crime, do portraits of them, and hear from them about their lives and what they had done.” Most of his subjects in the series were trying to go straight under very difficult circumstances, which is why Goldblatt refers to them not as criminals or offenders, but as ex-offenders.

David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, South Africa, and since the early 1960s he has devoted all of his time to photography. He has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the New Museum in New York, and the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson in Paris, among others. He was awarded the Hasselblad Award for Photography in 2006 and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award in 2009, and he is the 2010 Lucie Award Lifetime Achievement Honoree. His work is included in major international collections, including those of the Bibliotheque National de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the French National Art Collection. He has published several books of his work.

Photographer David Goldblatt brings together old and new photographs of Johannesburg in a solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery titled TJ: Some things old, some things new and some much the same. TJ – an obsolete acronym stemming from the South African pre-computerised system of motorcar registrations – stood for “Transvaal, Johannesburg”. These letters, Goldblatt explains, “implied a certain loyalty”. While some of the photographs to be on show at the Goodman Gallery were taken in what Goldblatt refers to as the “time of TJ”, the title refers to the notion that particular aspects of the city have changed very little since that era and in some cases, worsened. The exhibition ultimately elucidates on these particular aspects of the sprawling city of Johannesburg, which both infuriate and astound the photographer.

“One of the most damaging things that apartheid did to us,” Goldblatt says, “was that it denied us the experience of each other’s lives. Apartheid has succeeded all too well. It might have failed in its fundamental purpose of ruling the country for the next thousand years in that fashion, but it succeeded in dividing us very deeply and it will take a long time to overcome that.” This deep-rooted division is further exacerbated by a continuing social and urban fragmentation. While TJ includes old black and white photographs from an earlier era, new works explore the intricacies of crime, housing and poverty in Joburg.

Much of Goldblatt’s frustration lies in the city’s remarkable oversights, greed and lack of planning. “When we came out of the apartheid regime the Johannesburg municipality was split up and the Gauteng province became responsible for planning in the north-west and they just didn’t plan,” explains Goldblatt. “The result was that to a large degree property developers were at liberty to develop pretty well as they liked.” At the same time exorbitant amounts are spent on stadia and events such as the Miss World competition, while certain areas, such as Diepsloot, remain in dire need of basic facilities such as school libraries and storm water drainage systems. The urban sprawl that the city has become, as well as its often-desperate and baffling conditions, is revealed through aerial shots of the indiscriminately structured northern suburbs and townships, photographs of Zimbabwean refugees sleeping in a congested Methodist church and of the ruins of an amusement park in the foreground of Soccer City – a conflicting icon of growth and prodigality with a budget overrun of R800 million.

In another recent series, Goldblatt has focussed on ex-offenders, inviting them to revisit the scenes of the crimes that led to their incarceration and be photographed there. “I don’t believe that many of them are inherently evil,” says Goldblatt. “They came to their crime for a whole lot of other reasons.” In the 20 plus ex-offenders who he has met, Goldblatt – while admitting that this is only a small sample – has picked up on various factors and patterns that seem to contribute to their criminal behaviour such as domestic dysfunctionality (many, he found, grew up without fathers), and a dire education system. “We have failed a very large number of young black people in this country in regard to their education,” he says. “We had Bantu education under apartheid, and that was a crime against humanity, because it educated deliberately to under-educate. But the education of millions of young black people in post-apartheid has been almost as bad… their ability to mobilise upwards and out of the ranks of the poor is very limited. They’re at a tremendous disadvantage from the start.”

As always Goldblatt’s photographic style is unaffected and direct, reflecting art critic Ken Johnson’s observation that the “effect of Mr. Goldblatt’s understated, antisensational photographs and the spare words that accompany them is cumulative. They build into an infectiously mournful beauty. Even in pictures that seem almost nondescript… Mr. Goldblatt’s compositions have a classical elegance and a reticence that speaks volumes.”

David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, South Africa and since the early 1960s he has devoted all of his time to photography. In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, with, he explains “the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid”. In 1998 he was the first South African to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2001. The same year a retrospective exhibition of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years, began a tour of galleries and museums in New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany in 2002. He recently held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum (which travels to the South African Jewish Museum in October this year) and the New Museum, both in New York and is currently exhibiting alongside photographers such as Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman in The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at MoMA. Goldblatt’s photographs are in the collections of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and MoMA. He has published several books of his work. Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and was recently announced the 2010 Lucie Award Lifetime Achievement Honoree.

For more information, please contact
emmal@goodman-gallery.com or lara@goodman-gallery.com

T. +27 (0)11 788 1113 | F. +27 (0)11 788 9887| www.goodman-gallery.com
163 Jan Smuts Ave Parkwood, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2193

David Goldblatt has been photographing and documenting South African society for over 50 years. Born in Randfontein in 1930 to parents who came to South Africa to escape the persecution of Lithuanian Jews in 1890, he was simultaneously part of privileged white society and a victim of religious persecution and alienation. Motivated by his contradictory position in South African society, Goldblatt began photographing this society, and in 1963 decided to devote all of this time to photography.

Goldblatt focuses on critical explorations of South African society. While he uses photography as a means of accessing and exploring people and societies, David Goldblatt is acutely aware of the ethics of photography, and has used the camera as a way of capturing the complexities and intricacies of the specific conditions and situations that he photographs. His photographs are neither propaganda nor violently provocative, but rather become far more complex, meditative documents that are open to interpretation and that permeate far more deeply, and for longer than the initial shock and violence associated with documentary and news photography.

Goodman Gallery Cape Town presents Structures, a group exhibition bringing together works by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Carlos Garaicoa, David Goldblatt, Mikhael Subotzky and Jeremy Wafer. The exhibition is concerned with structures both monumental and mundane, and aims to examine the ways in which they inform the environments we inhabit, and what they suggest about the underlying systems that give rise to them.

David Goldblatt’s series South Africa: The Structure of Things Then deals in part with the architectural landscape of Apartheid South Africa and the relationship between the governing ideology of the time and its physical manifestations across the country. Mikhael Subotzky’s ongoing Security series is in some ways a contemporary response, documenting the surveillance cameras, security huts and electrified fences of the modern suburban landscape, and examining the links between poverty, race, crime and the effects of a legacy of discriminatory spatial planning.

Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer is a book of what Brecht called ‘photo-epigrams’: newspaper and magazine clippings of images of the Second World War, each captioned with a 4-line poem. In Poor Monuments, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin juxtapose pages from Brecht’s original book with images of modern conflicts (in particular the so-called War on Terror) to look at the changing (and sometimes unchanging) narrative of war, and the systems responsible for crafting and disseminating it.

Cuban-born Carlos Garacioa’s Para transformer la palabra política en hechos, finalmente II (To transform political speech into facts, finally) takes as its subject the city as a site for collective memory and imagination, while a new floor sculpture by Jeremy Wafer contemplates abstract and physical notions of space, and the degree to which a space is produced by the structures it contains.

Goodman Gallery Cape Town presents Structures, a group exhibition bringing together works by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Carlos Garaicoa, David Goldblatt, Mikhael Subotzky and Jeremy Wafer. The exhibition is concerned with structures both monumental and mundane, and aims to examine the ways in which they inform the environments we inhabit, and what they suggest about the underlying systems that give rise to them.

David Goldblatt’s series South Africa: The Structure of Things Then deals in part with the architectural landscape of Apartheid South Africa and the relationship between the governing ideology of the time and its physical manifestations across the country. Mikhael Subotzky’s ongoing Security series is in some ways a contemporary response, documenting the surveillance cameras, security huts and electrified fences of the modern suburban landscape, and examining the links between poverty, race, crime and the effects of a legacy of discriminatory spatial planning.

Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer is a book of what Brecht called ‘photo-epigrams’: newspaper and magazine clippings of images of the Second World War, each captioned with a 4-line poem. In Poor Monuments, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin juxtapose pages from Brecht’s original book with images of modern conflicts (in particular the so-called War on Terror) to look at the changing (and sometimes unchanging) narrative of war, and the systems responsible for crafting and disseminating it.

Cuban-born Carlos Garacioa’s Para transformer la palabra política en hechos, finalmente II (To transform political speech into facts, finally) takes as its subject the city as a site for collective memory and imagination, while a new floor sculpture by Jeremy Wafer contemplates abstract and physical notions of space, and the degree to which a space is produced by the structures it contains.

This March, Goodman Gallery Cape presents a group exhibition of work in a wide range of media. Titled Editions, the show brings together photographs, sculpture, video/multimedia works, lithographs, linocuts and photogravures by a variety of South African and international artists, with the common thread that each work forms part of an edition.

Kudzanai Chiurai shows a new film from his Conflict Resolution series, last seen at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, as well as a new photograph from the same body of work. New prints by Gerhard Marx and Walter Oltmann find them engaging with etching, lithography and woodblock printing in new and exciting ways.

Alfredo Jaar’s photographs of Serra Pelada, an opencast gold mine dug by human hands in Brazil, are shown as color transparencies mounted in lightboxes, and sit in uneasy relation to Liza Lou’s Gather Forty, a sculpture made from gold-plated beads threaded and bound in a sheaf.

The exhibition also includes new prints by Clive van den Berg and Diane Victor; photographs from Candice Breitz’ recent Extra!, last seen at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and David Goldblatt’s characteristically quiet colour landscapes; and a portfolio of photolithography by Moshekwa Langa.

Also on show is the full series of Robert Hodgins’ experimental Officers and Gents, to coincide with the Wits Art Museum’s exhibition of his print archive; a selection of lithographs from Sam Nhlengethwa’s recent Conversations series; Mikhael Subotzky’s Don’t even think of it, a film made from a series of still photographs shot by the artist in 2004; and a set of 7 photogravures by William Kentridge titled Zeno Writing II.

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg welcomes you to 2012 with Advance/… Notice, an exhibition of new works by a dynamic group of contemporary artists from around the world. As we advance into a new calendar year, this exhibition gives notice of innovations from some of our artists who are already familiar to you, and of our new ventures into an intellectual exchange with artists with whom we are excited to work for the first time. This show will also give audiences a preview of what is to come, as many of the featured artists have solo shows planned for 2012 at Goodman Gallery spaces and other prestigious South African institutions.
Advance/… Notice introduces newly perfected techniques or processes for some of our well-known artists, such as platinum photographic prints by David Goldblatt, and a completely new turn of direction and field of interest for African American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who first exhibited with us on In Context in 2010, as well as for Sigalit Landau, the acclaimed Israeli artist we co-hosted at last year’s Venice Biennale. These international savants are joined by South African artists such as Hasan and Husain Essop, Moshekwa Langa, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge, Rosenclaire, and Frances Goodman revealing either brand new works, or works not yet seen in Johannesburg. Also featured are works by Kendell Geers, whose retrospective exhibition will open at IZIKO South African National Gallery in late March 2012.
Our first show of the year seems an apt time to introduce the novel and the unexpected in the work of a number of artists and to also welcome prominent figures including Liza Lou, a world-renowned American now living and working in KwaZulu Natal; South African Candice Breitz, now resident in Berlin; Chilean-born New Yorker Alfredo Jaar; London-based Iranian Reza Aramesh, as well as Carla Busuttil – a young South African artist based in Berlin who is well-established in the United Kingdom, but has never before exhibited in her home country.
Liza Lou presents a work titled Gather Forty, one of a series of forty individual sculptures made from gold-plated beads that have been expertly threaded onto four hundred individual pieces of stainless steel wire and bound in a sheaf – continuing the shift of the beadwork medium from craft to conceptual art. Alfredo Jaar, internationally recognised artist, filmmaker and architect, celebrated for the public interventions he has created all over the world, shows From Time to Time, a panel of nine Time magazine covers focusing on Africa that either feature animals or malnourished Africans – revealing how the rest of the world often encapsulates its second largest continent. Breitz, who opens a major survey of her work titled Extra! at the Standard Bank Gallery this February, presents The Character, a video installation filmed in Mumbai that seeks to understand the role and influence of child characters in mainstream Indian cinema through interviews with a group of young moviegoers. In Action 78, Aramesh uses familiar scenes from news footage of the first Gulf War to restage, re-present and destabilise any easy readings of the conflicts we think we understand. Oil paintings by Busuttil offer a sinisterly-executed perusal of the exploitation of power and cruelty.
We are also very pleased to present for the first time the work of Nelisiwe Xaba, who will be presenting an interactive dance and video collaboration with Mocke J van Veuren at Goodman Gallery Projects in February. The crossover into visual art is exciting new territory for this renowned performer/dancer.
Goodman Gallery hopes you will join us to be inspired, challenged and excited by this exhibition and its promise of advances in the visual arts of South Africa. We trust you will find the exhibition gives notice of an innovative and exciting programme for 2012 in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The Joburg Art Fair was started three years ago by Artlogic with First National Bank as the primary sponsor.

It is the only art fair on the African continent and the only art fair in the world to focus on African contemporary art. Over the three year period it has become a meeting place for those interested in African contemporary art. The Joburg Art Fair is a small, boutique Fair committed to showcasing the best galleries interested in this region.

As it is the only large scale annual visual arts event in South Africa, the Fair makes an effort to give exposure to artists who work outside of the gallery circuit and routinely curate spaces for tertiary institutions, or project spaces that result from proposals submitted to Artlogic.

Each year our visitor numbers grow to include more foreigners, more students, and more of the general public interested in this kind of high-end contemporary event.

For 2011, we are working to curate a space that is welcoming and where visitors can spend an entire day. We are creating a food area that will sport four of the country’s top wine estates and a Pommery Champagne lounge in association with St Leger and Viney and Business Day Wanted Magazine.

Goodman Gallery presents a group exhibition simply titled Winter Show, featuring a range of local and international art luminaries. Traveling from Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, the show presents recent works by Goodman stalwarts such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa and Mikhael Subotzky, as well as revealing a shift in the Gallery’s approach, showcasing work from around the African continent and beyond that is both explicitly and implicitly concerned with the synergies and tensions that exist between Africa and the rest of the globe. Some of the participating international artists, such as Ghada Amer, are not only being showcased, but are now officially represented by the Goodman Gallery.

The Winter Show will elaborate on the thorny notion of the politics of representation, which Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz confronted in their 1999 collection of essays Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. The book was a direct response to the critique of Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who was the creative director of the Second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997. At the time, Enwezor interrogated the practice of artists such as Breitz, Minnette Vári and Penny Siopis, considering in great depth the question of ‘who has the right to represent whom?’. Now, over a decade later, accusations of misrepresentation have been revisited and reconsidered, not only by Enwezor himself and those whose essays were included in Grey Areas, but by the art community at large. The Winter Show augments the dialogue, bringing new voices into the conversation.

Compelling features of the Winter Show include one of artist, Kara Walker’s 2009 films – which are based on narratives from the archives of a bureau established in 1865 to assist African Americans with the transition from slavery to freedom – featuring the artist’s signature black-silhouette cut-out figures, which almost impossibly convey the complexities of race, gender, sexuality and power in their stilted and evocative movements. William Kentridge will present a new drawing produced this year, a large scale tapestry, as well as a maquette of the structure World on its Hind Legs, created in collaboration with Gerhard Marx.

With Goodman Gallery firmly established as a world-class contemporary art institution, the Winter Show will reveal the gallery’s commitment – not only to representing artists of the highest caliber, but to bringing an innovative programme of relevant and compelling international works to South Africa, offering audiences exposure to some of the best contemporary work being produced, both locally and abroad.

This winter the Goodman Gallery will relaunch its Parkwood space, which has been extensively reconsidered, both physically and conceptually. This launch will be initiated with a group exhibition simply titled Winter Show, featuring a range of luminary-status local and international artists. The show will not only present recent works by Goodman stalwarts such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa and Mikhael Subotzky, but will also reveal a shift in the Gallery’s approach, showcasing work from around the Continent and beyond that is both explicitly and implicitly concerned with synergies and tensions between Africa and the rest of the globe. Some of the participating international artists, such as Ghada Amer and Hank Willis Thomas, are not only being showcased by the Goodman Gallery, but are now officially represented by us.

The Winter Show will act as a confluence of the Goodman Gallery’s top represented artists, as well as artists participating in In Context – a series of exhibitions and interventions currently taking place at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Amer, Willis Thomas, Bili Bidjocka, Willem Boshoff and Kara Walker will participate in both shows, with the Winter Show presenting some of their more recent work. While In Context manifests an intimate and often candid exploration of the dynamics of the African continent, the Winter Show will offer a broader conceptual platform, covering many aspects of South African, African and global landscapes and conditions.

The Winter Show will elaborate on the thorny notion of the politics of representation, which Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz confronted in their 1999 collection of essays Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. The book was a direct response to the critique of Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who was the creative director of the Second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997. At the time, Enwezor interrogated the practice of artists such as Breitz, Minnette Vári and Penny Siopis, intricately considering the question of ‘who has the right to represent whom?’ Now, over a decade later, accusations of misrepresentation have been revisited and reconsidered not only by Enwezor himself and those whose essays were included in Grey Areas, but by the art community at large. In Context magnifies these issues, while the Winter Show augments the dialogue, bringing new voices into the conversation.

Compelling features of the Winter Show include two of Walker’s 2009 films – which are based on narratives from archives of a bureau established in 1865 to assist African Americans with the transition from slavery to freedom – presenting the artist’s signature black-silhouette cut-out figures, which almost impossibly convey the complexities of race, gender, sexuality and power in their stilted and provocative movements. Jenny Holzer’s Purple Red Curve (2005) transmits a coalescence of master narratives through a curved electronic LED sign. Jeremy Wafer will create a site-specific wall drawing in the Goodman Gallery specifically for the show. Kentridge will present a series of new drawings produced this year as well as a maquette of the structure World on its Hind Legs, created in collaboration with Gerhard Marx. A large scale, steel version of this work will be launched at the Apartheid Museum on 8 July 2010 as part of In Context. The Winter Show will also feature an ongoing screening of all of the Goodman Gallery’s top art films by leading artists such as Kentridge and Vári.

The Goodman Gallery in Parkwood has undergone numerous physical transformations and now boasts a new showroom and a space dedicated to photographic works. We are in the process of establishing an art library accessible to the visiting public and will offer a range of educational art talks and events during the Winter Show.

With Goodman Gallery firmly established as a prestigious, world-class contemporary art institution, the Winter Show will reveal how the Gallery – beyond representing artists of the highest caliber – is dedicated to bringing an innovative programme of relevant and compelling international works to South Africa, offering audiences exposure to some of the best contemporary work being produced locally and abroad.