Against the Grain | Photography from South Africa and the United States
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Against the Grain, an exhibition of photographic works by Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Ruth Motau, Ming Smith and Lindokuhle Sobekwa. Across three generations, the exhibition explores how each photographer has used the medium to expose, question and reflect on their social and political contexts. From the 1960s to the present, the works convey an explicitly South African narrative, whilst revealing some historical parallels with the United States. From the segregation and disenfranchisement laws of Apartheid to the era emerging from the liberation struggle and US civil rights movement, the exhibition is framed by Black life under those conditions. Often working against the grain of dominant culture, the photographers demonstrate varying degrees of resistance.
House of Bondage, Ernest Cole’s iconic photo essay, was the first book to visually expose the extreme injustices of the Apartheid regime. First published in 1967, the book documents the daily experience of Black citizens during a period dominated by racial inequality and trauma. It was a courageous attempt to seek help from the global community, setting a precedent over time for future South African photojournalists. Making himself invisible as a photographer, Cole concealed his identity and camera to place himself at the centre of oppressive social structures: passbook arrests, destitute hospitals and schools, spaces of servitude, mining compounds and more. In his words, “three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.”
Concurrently, David Goldblatt was engaged in the implicit conditions of South African society – the values by which people lived – rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions. Goldblatt says in his last interview, “I was drawn not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” (The Last Interview, Steidl, 2019, Alexandra Dodd). Subtle in his approach, Goldblatt’s photographs uncovered the same pervasive and traumatic realities of South African society – by grouping rare vintage prints by Goldblatt and Cole, the exhibition opens a dialogue between their distinct approaches while offering moments where perspectives coexist.
Artworks
About
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.
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Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Lindokuhle Sobekwa is a South African photographer born in in 1995 in Katlehong, Johannesburg. He was introduced to photography in 2012 through the Of Soul and Joy Project in Buhlebuzile high school in Thokoza township, where his photography mentors included Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi.
In 2013 Sobekwa joined Live Magazine as a part-time photographer in 2013. In subsequent years he exhibited work at Kalashnikovv Gallery in South Africa and with No Man’s Art Gallery in from the Netherlands and in their pop-up exhibitions in South Africa, Iran, and Norway. In the past year his work has been shown internationally at Paris Photo by both Goodman Gallery and Magnin-A gallery.
Sobekwa’s breakout photo series Nyaope: ‘Everything you do my Boss, will do’ was published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa) in 2014 and his work was featured in Vice magazine and the Standaard in the same year. He completed the foundation course at Market Photo Workshop and in 2017, Sobekwa was selected by the Magnum Foundation as a fellow in the renowned Photography and Social Justice program. This is where he developed the project I carry Her photo with Me, a photographic search for answers about the disappearance of his sister Ziyanda. A journal created during this time was turned into a hand-made limited edition photo book and exhibited in the African Cosmologies exhibition, curated by Mark Sealy, at the Houston Fotofest in March 2020.
In 2018, Sobekwa was awarded a grant from the Magnum Foundation Fund to continue with his long term project Nyaope. He is also currently working on a collaborative project with French Photographer Cyprien Clément-Delmas about the community of Daleside in South Africa. This series will be published by Gost in 2021 and has been supported by the Rubis Mécénat Foundation.
Sobekwa joined Magnum Photos in 2018 and became an associate member in 2020. He participates in a variety of photography related activities with the agency, including assignments in Kenya and South Africa, as well as giving lectures about his work and photography in South Africa for audiences in various European and American cities.
Sobekwa continues to live and work in Thokoza.
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