David Goldblatt / Structures of Dominion & Democracy

David Goldblatt 01 November - 06 December 2014 Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

The Goodman Gallery is pleased to present major photographs in the ongoing Structures series by David Goldblatt. Structures is a major body of work described by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer as “an extraordinary visual history of a country and its people."

For over three decades Goldblatt has travelled South Africa photographing sites weighted with historical narrative: monuments, as well as private, religious and secular sites that reveal something about the people who built them.

These sites also allow us a glimpse into the everyday. Each place is a repository, a landscape containing an epic story that has involved whole communities. The experience is sometimes told through the memorialising of remarkable individuals. Titled Structures of Dominion & Democracy, the exhibition traverses two distinct eras in our history. Instead of the word ‘Baasskap’, Goldblatt refers to the era of inequality as Dominion (see artist’s statement, below).

But, Goldblatt notes, the new exhibition concentrates on, but is not entirely devoted to the period after the fall of apartheid: “I’m mainly showing Democracy. And the reason for this is that people here are familiar with Baaskap and the period of apartheid, but they are not very familiar with looking at what is emerging now.”

By looking at transforming spaces, Structures of Dominion & Democracy offers us a way of understanding the transformation of a people.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT BY DAVID GOLDBLATT

In the 1980s and ‘90s I photographed structures that we South Africans had made during the Era of Baasskap, that time, from about 1660 until 1990, in which Whites gradually came to exert dominion over all of South Africa and its peoples. It was the values we had expressed in those structures that I sought to elicit and explore in photographs and text.

Beginning in 1999 – five years after the first democratic elections that brought the African National Congress to power – and continuing into the present, I have engaged in a similar photography of some of the structures that have emerged with our democracy and that I believe are expressive of values in this new, still nascent way of being in our society.

The photographs in this, the Goodman Gallery exhibition of 2014, come mainly from the time of Democracy.

DAVID GOLDBLATT

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. 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 around the world. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit 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. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York and exhibited alongside photographers such as Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman in The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at MoMA. His work was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has featured on major shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Centre of Photography in New York and the Barbican Centre in London. He has published several books of his work. Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and is the 2010 Lucie Award Lifetime Achievement Honoree. Goldblatt received the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013.

Artworks

Frances Baard, militant trade unionist and leader of the ANC Women’s League, sculpted by Anton Momberg. Kimberley, 5 February 2013 (4_A1051)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, backed onto dibond approx. 98 x 120 cm

Frances Baard, militant trade unionist and leader of the ANC Women’s League, sculpted by Anton Momberg. Kimberley, 5 February 2013 (4_A1051)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, backed onto dibond approx. 98 x 120 cm

Domestic workers afternoon off, Sunninghill, Sandton. 23 July 1999 (4_7850)

1999 Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper approx. 30 x 40cm Add to My Selection

Domestic workers afternoon off, Sunninghill, Sandton. 23 July 1999 (4_7850)

1999 Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper approx. 30 x 40cm Add to My Selection

Domestic workers afternoon off, Sunninghill, Sandton. 23 July 1999 (4_7850)

1999 Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper approx. 30 x 40cm Add to My Selection

East Bank Location was renamed Duncan Village when Governor-General Sir Patick Duncan inaugurated a housing scheme there on September 21 1941, and unveiled this name-pillar. Duncan Village, East London. 21 October 2013 (4_A1104)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 120 x 98 cm

DURBAN MARKET with painting by Faith 47 Warwick Junction and the city. eThekwini, Durban. 3 July 2014 (NK3_0495)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

The grave of Sarah Bartmann, near her birthplace. Hankey, Eastern Cape. 17 October 2013 (4_A1122)

2013 Demonstration print / Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

The Women's Monument at the Union Buildings, Pretoria. It commemorates the march by some 20,000 women on 9 August 1956, through Pretoria to the Union Buildings, where they attempted to present a letter to prime minister JG Strijdom, protesting the 'pass laws' and in particular, the law requiring African women to carry 'passes'. Neither Strijdom nor anyone else in government accepted the letter. In 2006 this memorial to the march was unveiled. It is in the amphitheatre where the women gathered. The artists were Wilma Cruise and Marcus Holmes. It is not accessible to the public. 1 November 2013 (4_A1141)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded approx. 98 x 120 cm

The Women's Monument at the Union Buildings, Pretoria. It commemorates the march by some 20,000 women on 9 August 1956, through Pretoria to the Union Buildings, where they attempted to present a letter to prime minister JG Strijdom, protesting the 'pass laws' and in particular, the law requiring African women to carry 'passes'. Neither Strijdom nor anyone else in government accepted the letter. In 2006 this memorial to the march was unveiled. It is in the amphitheatre where the women gathered. The artists were Wilma Cruise and Marcus Holmes. It is not accessible to the public. 1 November 2013 (4_A1141)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded approx. 98 x 120 cm

Bronze memorial to Zulu warriors killed at Shiyane/Rorkes Drift in a fierce battle with British soldiers on the 22 and 23 January 1879. Their shields symbolically cover the bodies of the fallen warriors, as was traditional. A leopard – the king – rests proudly on them and from the middle grows a buffalo tree, the thorns of which grow in pairs, one is curved and harks to the past, one is straight and speaks to the future. Branches of the tree are used to ‘sweep’ up the spirits of the slain so that they can be taken home to the ancestors. Behind is part of a cattle byre, symbolising traditional burial. Peter Hall was the sculptor. 8 August 2014 (NK3_0636)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

The Thinking Stone, 32 tons of granite sculpted by Willem Boshoff. One of a number of artworks commissioned by the university after some Afrikaner male students were alleged to have urinated into the food of some black workers. This 'sculpture-on-the-campus' project was undertaken in the hope that it would "promote greater respect for cultural differences and would instill a sense of belonging in staff and students". University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. 14 March 2013 (4_A1181)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, backed onto dibond approx. 98 x 120 cm

One of three elephants by sculptor Andries Botha, commissioned by the eThekwini City Council (Durban) as part of an urban renewal project, lies broken by vandals and metal thieves on the traffic island where the sculptures were sited. Two weeks from completion in 2010, the work was stopped when an African National Congress councillor objected that the elephants resembled those in the logo of the Inkatha Freedom Party. Warwick Triangle, Durban. 7 August 2014 (NK3_0585)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

Isandlwana, where on January 22 1879, a Zulu army defending their kingdom against a British invasion, decimated a large part of the British force, killing 858 White and 471 Black men. 8 August 2014 (NK3_0645)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

Freedom Square: here, in the time of apartheid, on 26 June 1955, under harassment by the police, some 3000 people of all races, from all over South Africa, gathered in a Congress of the People and adopted the Freedom Charter, a template for the governance of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The Charter became the basis of South Africa’s democratic constitution. Kliptown, Soweto, Johannesburg. 10 December 2003 (4_9056)

2003 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

Freedom Square: here, in the time of apartheid, on 26 June 1955, under harassment by the police, some 3000 people of all races, from all over South Africa, gathered in a Congress of the People and adopted the Freedom Charter, a template for the governance of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The Charter became the basis of South Africa’s democratic constitution. Kliptown, Soweto, Johannesburg. 10 December 2003 (4_9056)

2003 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

Freedom Square: here, in the time of apartheid, on 26 June 1955, under harassment by the police, some 3000 people of all races, from all over South Africa, gathered in a Congress of the People and adopted the Freedom Charter, a template for the governance of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The Charter became the basis of South Africa’s democratic constitution. Kliptown, Soweto, Johannesburg. 10 December 2003 (4_9056)

2003 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

Freedom Square: here, in the time of apartheid, on 26 June 1955, under harassment by the police, some 3000 people of all races, from all over South Africa, gathered in a Congress of the People and adopted the Freedom Charter, a template for the governance of a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The Charter became the basis of South Africa’s democratic constitution. Kliptown, Soweto, Johannesburg. 10 December 2003 (4_9056)

2003 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

Part of the Candle of Hope a sculpture by businessman Bart Dorrestein and sculptor Sally-Ann Graham, corner Maud and Fifth Streets, Sandton, Johannesburg. 18 December 2011 (4_A0827)

2011 Demonstration print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper

Part of the Candle of Hope a sculpture by businessman Bart Dorrestein and sculptor Sally-Ann Graham, corner Maud and Fifth Streets, Sandton, Johannesburg. 18 December 2011 (4_A0827)

2011 Demonstration print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper

On August 16 2012 South African Police shot striking mineworkers of the Lonrho platinum mines, killing 34 and wounding 78 in seemingly wild shooting without good cause. The men were shot, some with their hands up in surrender, within a radius of about 300 metres of this koppie on which they met. Beyond is the Lonhro smelter, which stood idle during the strike. Marikana, North-West Province. 11 May 2014 (4_A1201)

2014 Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

On August 16 2012 South African Police shot striking mineworkers of the Lonrho platinum mines, killing 34 and wounding 78 in seemingly wild shooting without good cause. The men were shot, some with their hands up in surrender, within a radius of about 300 metres of this koppie on which they met. Beyond is the Lonhro smelter, which stood idle during the strike. Marikana, North-West Province. 11 May 2014 (4_A1201)

2014 Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

On August 16 2012 South African Police shot striking mineworkers of the Lonrho platinum mines, killing 34 and wounding 78 in seemingly wild shooting without good cause. The men were shot, some with their hands up in surrender, within a radius of about 300 metres of this koppie on which they met. Beyond is the Lonhro smelter, which stood idle during the strike. Marikana, North-West Province. 11 May 2014 (4_A1201)

2014 Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

This monument, covering what was Freedom Square, commemorates the Congress of the People in 1955. Costing R160 million it has a hotel, conference centre, auditorium , galleries, shops, museum, plaza for informal traders, conical tower in which the Freedom Charter is displayed. The community of Kliptown in whose midst it was built, were not consulted. Most of the facilities are hardly used. Fearing that tourists might confuse Freedom Park, Pretoria with Freedom Square, Kiptown, the branding experts named it instead, the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication. Sisulu had very little to do with this place. Kliptown, Soweto, 22 June 2006 (4_9875)

2005 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

This monument, covering what was Freedom Square, commemorates the Congress of the People in 1955. Costing R160 million it has a hotel, conference centre, auditorium , galleries, shops, museum, plaza for informal traders, conical tower in which the Freedom Charter is displayed. The community of Kliptown in whose midst it was built, were not consulted. Most of the facilities are hardly used. Fearing that tourists might confuse Freedom Park, Pretoria with Freedom Square, Kiptown, the branding experts named it instead, the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication. Sisulu had very little to do with this place. Kliptown, Soweto, 22 June 2006 (4_9875)

2005 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

This monument, covering what was Freedom Square, commemorates the Congress of the People in 1955. Costing R160 million it has a hotel, conference centre, auditorium , galleries, shops, museum, plaza for informal traders, conical tower in which the Freedom Charter is displayed. The community of Kliptown in whose midst it was built, were not consulted. Most of the facilities are hardly used. Fearing that tourists might confuse Freedom Park, Pretoria with Freedom Square, Kiptown, the branding experts named it instead, the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication. Sisulu had very little to do with this place. Kliptown, Soweto, 22 June 2006 (4_9875)

2005 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper

Unity is power: Let us be united, is a carving in wild fig by Noria Mabasa, on the campus of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. 14 March 2013 (4_A1055)

2013 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx 42 x 53cm / approx. 98 x 120 cm

Memorial to the Enslaved by Wilma Cruise and Gavin Young. The white building was the Dutch East India Company's slave lodge in the centre of Cape Town. Some 9000 slaves, convicts and mentally disturbed people are thought to have been confined within it between 1679 and 1811. It is now a museum. 11 March 2012 (4_A0894)

2012 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, backed onto dibond approx. 98 x 120 cm

Freedom Park and the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria. 26 May 2014 (4_A1162)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, backed onto dibond approx. 98 x 120 cm

Freedom Park and the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria. 26 May 2014 (4_A1162)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, backed onto dibond approx. 98 x 120 cm

Copies of advertisements regarding destitute children that appeared in the Cape Government Gazette, form part of a memorial to children entitled We are still here. Between 1841 and 1921 some 7000 children were advertised as destitute in the Gazette. If not claimed by someone able to support them they were indentured, presumably as labourers. Memorial by Lovell Friedman and Leora Lewis, Longmarket pedestrian mall, Cape Town. 11 March 2012 (4_A0900)

2012 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

Copies of advertisements regarding destitute children that appeared in the Cape Government Gazette, form part of a memorial to children entitled We are still here. Between 1841 and 1921 some 7000 children were advertised as destitute in the Gazette. If not claimed by someone able to support them they were indentured, presumably as labourers. Memorial by Lovell Friedman and Leora Lewis, Longmarket pedestrian mall, Cape Town. 11 March 2012 (4_A0900)

2012 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

Copies of advertisements regarding destitute children that appeared in the Cape Government Gazette, form part of a memorial to children entitled We are still here. Between 1841 and 1921 some 7000 children were advertised as destitute in the Gazette. If not claimed by someone able to support them they were indentured, presumably as labourers. Memorial by Lovell Friedman and Leora Lewis, Longmarket pedestrian mall, Cape Town. 11 March 2012 (4_A0900)

2012 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

Cows at a taxi rank on Error Street, New Doornfontein, Johannesburg. 8 December 2012 (4_A1024)

2012 Carbon Ink on Hahnemuhle 315gsm A0: 80.1 x 114.9 cm

Cows at a taxi rank on Error Street, New Doornfontein, Johannesburg. 8 December 2012 (4_A1024)

2012 Carbon Ink on Hahnemuhle 315gsm A0: 80.1 x 114.9 cm

A modest square, carefully tended by the municipality, sown, at the time of this photograph with blue daisies, the borders of its paths neatly outlined by beer bottles. It is a memorial to local heroes killed in the struggle against apartheid, Steynsburg, Eastern Cape. 29 January 2013 (4_A1031)

2013 Demonstration print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper

Belated Wake sculpted in 2010 by Angus Taylor. Waterkloof Corner Centre, Pretoria. 11 February 2014 (NK3_0146)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 120 x 98 cm

Sculpted in stainless steel, a tricycle commemorates the happiest years of the poet Ingrid Jonker, spent here in her childhood at Gordon’s Bay. In 1965 at the age of 31, she took her own life by walking into the sea at Three Anchor Bay. Sculpture by Tyrone Apollis in 2006. Gordon’s Bay, May 28 2014 (NK3_0414)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

A portrait of Nelson Mandela in steel uprights at the site of his capture by South African police on August 5 1962. Near Howick, KwaZulu-Natal. July 14 2014 (4_A1227)

2014 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper approx. 98 x 120 cm

The City, The Firewalker and the aftermath of copper cable theft, Queen Elizabeth bridge, Johannesburg, 29 December 2011. The 11 metre sculpture by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx depicts one of the women often seen on Joburg streets carrying a brazier with live coals on her head. She will set it up on a sidewalk where she will roast yellow mielies or sheep's heads for sale to passersby. The paving stones are scattered because someone tied a rope to the electric cable under the lamp post to a truck and ripped the cable out to steal the copper wire (4_A0821)

2011 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

The City, The Firewalker and the aftermath of copper cable theft, Queen Elizabeth bridge, Johannesburg, 29 December 2011. The 11 metre sculpture by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx depicts one of the women often seen on Joburg streets carrying a brazier with live coals on her head. She will set it up on a sidewalk where she will roast yellow mielies or sheep's heads for sale to passersby. The paving stones are scattered because someone tied a rope to the electric cable under the lamp post to a truck and ripped the cable out to steal the copper wire (4_A0821)

2011 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

The City, The Firewalker and the aftermath of copper cable theft, Queen Elizabeth bridge, Johannesburg, 29 December 2011. The 11 metre sculpture by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx depicts one of the women often seen on Joburg streets carrying a brazier with live coals on her head. She will set it up on a sidewalk where she will roast yellow mielies or sheep's heads for sale to passersby. The paving stones are scattered because someone tied a rope to the electric cable under the lamp post to a truck and ripped the cable out to steal the copper wire (4_A0821)

2011 Demonstration print / Exhibition print / Silver gelatin on fibre based paper Approx (A0) 86 x 110cm / Approx 42 x 53cm

Memorial to Sister Dr. Mary Aidan Quinlan who was murdered on November 9 1952 by a mob near Duncan Village. It was the time of the ANC’s Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign. Several thousand people had gathered on Bantu Square, near Duncan Village, for what was supposedly a religious meeting for which the magistrate had given permission. Hidden in a house nearby, waiting to address the crowd were ANC leaders. At the last minute, the police, suspecting the true purpose, ordered the crowd to disperse, but opened fire before they could do so. Nine were killed and many wounded. The crowd became a vengeance-seeking mob into which, taking a familiar shortcut to her church, drove Sister Quinlan. Her car was overturned and set alight. She was killed and perhaps partly cannabilised. Running battles between police, troops and township people continued into the night. It was said that more than two hundred people were killed. She had devotedly served the Duncan Village community as a medical doctor. Koko Qebeyi, not born at that time, became an anti-apartheid activist and city councillor and arranged for the erection of this monument to a woman who had devotedly served the community of Duncan Village. Catholic Church, Duncan Village, East London. 13 October 2013 (4_A1106)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded approx. 120 x 98 cm

Memorial to Sister Dr. Mary Aidan Quinlan who was murdered on November 9 1952 by a mob near Duncan Village. It was the time of the ANC’s Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign. Several thousand people had gathered on Bantu Square, near Duncan Village, for what was supposedly a religious meeting for which the magistrate had given permission. Hidden in a house nearby, waiting to address the crowd were ANC leaders. At the last minute, the police, suspecting the true purpose, ordered the crowd to disperse, but opened fire before they could do so. Nine were killed and many wounded. The crowd became a vengeance-seeking mob into which, taking a familiar shortcut to her church, drove Sister Quinlan. Her car was overturned and set alight. She was killed and perhaps partly cannabilised. Running battles between police, troops and township people continued into the night. It was said that more than two hundred people were killed. She had devotedly served the Duncan Village community as a medical doctor. Koko Qebeyi, not born at that time, became an anti-apartheid activist and city councillor and arranged for the erection of this monument to a woman who had devotedly served the community of Duncan Village. Catholic Church, Duncan Village, East London. 13 October 2013 (4_A1106)

2013 Silver gelatin on fiber based paper, dibonded approx. 120 x 98 cm

Miriam Mazibuko waters the garden of her RDP house for which she waited eight years. It consists of one room. Her four children live with her in-laws. Extension 8, Far East Alexandra Township, 12 September 2006 (4_9958)

2006 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper Add to My Selection

Miriam Mazibuko waters the garden of her RDP house for which she waited eight years. It consists of one room. Her four children live with her in-laws. Extension 8, Far East Alexandra Township, 12 September 2006 (4_9958)

2006 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper Add to My Selection

Miriam Mazibuko waters the garden of her RDP house for which she waited eight years. It consists of one room. Her four children live with her in-laws. Extension 8, Far East Alexandra Township, 12 September 2006 (4_9958)

2006 Digital Prints on 100% cotton rag paper Add to My Selection

About

Download full CV

David Goldblatt

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 people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era – until his death in June, 2018. 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. In general, Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert, to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.

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. 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. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York. His work was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has featured on shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Barbican Centre in London. In 2017, Goldblatt installed a series of portraits from his photographic essay Ex-Offenders in former prisons in Birmingham and Manchester. The portraits depict men and women, from South African and the UK, at the scene of their crimes, with accompanying texts that relate the subjects’ stories in their words. In the last year of his life, two major retrospectives were opened at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Goldblatt is 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.