Margaret Mcingana, who later became famous as the singer Margaret Singana, at home, Sunday afternoon. Zola, Soweto (2_6547)

David Goldblatt
Margaret Mcingana, who later became famous as the singer Margaret Singana, at home, Sunday afternoon. Zola, Soweto (2_6547), October 1970
Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper, dibonded
Image: 50 x 50 cm

Goldblatt spent years taking photographs of Johannesburg – of the white areas of the city centre, the comfortable suburbs and the townships on the outskirts of the city. Goldblatt was engaged in the conditions of society and the values by which people lived, rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions. He intended to discover and probe these values through the medium of photography. “Johannesburg is not an easy city to love. From its beginnings as a mining camp in 1886, whites did not want brown and black people living among or near them and over the years pushed them further and further from the city and its white suburbs. Like the city itself my thoughts and feelings about Joburg are fragmented. I can’t easily bring a vision or a coherent bundle of ideas to mind and say, ‘That’s Joburg for me.’ Over the years I have photographed a wide range of subjects, each was almost self-contained, a fragment of a whole that I’ve never quite grasped.” — David Goldblatt, 2017