| "While working in the business and taking a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Witwatersrand University, my interest in photography continued and I taught myself basic skills. After the death of my father in 1962, I sold the family business and have, since September 1963, devoted all of my time to photography. My professional work has been almost entirely outside the studio and has involved a broad variety of assignments for magazines, corporations and institutions in South Africa and overseas. My personal work since 1961 has consisted of a series of critical explorations of South African society a number of which have been exhibited and published in book form. In 1985 the British television network, Channel 4, made and screened a one hour documentary, "David Goldblatt: In Black and White", which was subsequently shown in the USA [PBS] and Australia. I was a Hallmark Fellow at the Aspen Conference in Design, Aspen, Colorado, 1987 and the Gahan Fellow in Photography at Harvard University in 1992. In 1995 I was awarded the Camera Austria Prize for an excerpt from my essay, "South Africa the Structure of Things Then". The University of Cape Town conferred the degree of Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts on me in 2001. In 1989 I founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, with the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid. The Workshop has been successful in creating an environment in which people of all races collaborate constructively. It operates under a full-time director and part-time teachers, six days per week from premises in the Newtown Cultural Precinct of the city, qualifying about 250 students per annum, a number of whom, having completed advanced courses, are now working as professional photographers. In 2001 a retrospective exhibition of my work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years co-curated by Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor and produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), began a tour of galleries and museums which has so far taken it to New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels and Munich. It opened in the Johannesburg Art Gallery in August 2005. In 1998 I was the first South African to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, when photographs from the essay, South Africa: the Structure of Things Then, were shown. Excerpts from my photographic essays on Boksburg and on recent developments in Johannesburg were on exhibition at Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany in 2002. In 2004 the French National Art Collection acquired some 54 of my prints. Invited in 1999 by the Art Gallery of Western Australia to participate in an exhibition entitled 'Home' and to contribute a photographic project of my choice in Australia to that show, I photographed an essay on Wittenoom, a town that had been decimated by the mining and effects of blue asbestos.
Since 1999 I have been photographing aspects of post-apartheid South Africa and exploring the use of colour photography in my personal work. David Goldblatt has won the most prestigious photography prize in the world, The Hasselblad Photography Award. He is the only South African artist to win this prize, and will receive it at an award ceremony on the 25th November 2006 in Goteberg, Sweden. For more information please visit the following link: |
| PRINCIPAL PUBLIC COLLECTIONS | |
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South African National Gallery, Cape Town Durban Art Gallery Johannesburg Art Gallery University of South Africa University of the Witwatersrand Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Victoria and Albert Museum, London The French National Art Collection The Art Gallery of Western Australia | |
| BOOKS | |
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"On The Mines" with Nadine Gordimer, Struik, Cape Town, 1973 "Some Afrikaners Photographed", Murray Crawford Johannesburg, 1975 “Cape Dutch Homesteads", with Margaret Courtney-Clark and John Kench, Struik, Cape Town 1981 "In Boksburg", Gallery Press, Cape Town, 1982,br> "Lifetimes: Under Apartheid", with Nadine Gordimer, Knopf, New York, 1986,br> "The Transported of KwaNdebele" with Brenda Goldblatt and Phillip van Niekerk, Aperture, New York, 1989. "South Africa: the Structure of Things Then", Oxford University Press, Cape Town, and Monacelli Press, New York, 1998 “David Goldblatt 55” (one of a series about photographers) Phaidon Press, London, 2001 “David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years”, Actar and Macba, Barcelona, 2001 “Particulars”, Goodman Gallery Editions, Johannesburg, 2003 [Awarded the Arles Book Prize for 2004] Intersections, Prestel, Munich, 2005 | |
| PRINCIPAL EXHIBITIONS | |
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Photographers' Gallery, London, 1974, 1986 Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1985 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1975 Durban Art Gallery, 1977 SA National Gallery, Cape Town, 1983 Various exhibitions since 1978 at the Market Theatre Galleries, Johannesburg, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998 Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam,1998-9 South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 1999 Axa Gallery, New York, 2001 Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2002 Witte de With, Rotterdam 2002 Centro Cultural de Belem-Fundacao, Lisbon, 2002 Modern Art, Oxford, 2003 Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels, 2003 Lenbachhaus, Munich, 2003 Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, 2005 Johannesburg Art Gallery 2005 Rencontres Festival, Arles, France, July - September, 2006. A retrospective of his work, accompanied by new book, printed by Contrasto. Africa Remix, Stockholm, October 2006. Landscape: New Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 2006. Michael Stevenson Fine Art, Cape Town, 'Some Afrikaners Revisited', 24 October - 25 November 2006 click here for more information » Various group shows including:
“South Africa: the Cordoned Heart”, South Africa and the USA, 1986 |