Michael Stevenson Hill House De Smidt Street, Green Point Cape Town Afrique du Sud
David Goldblatt's photographs of the last decade are an ongoing exploration of the intersections between people, values and land in post-apartheid South Africa. They develop and take into new terrain the approach underlying much of his work in the years of apartheid, work which culminated in his monumental South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (published by Oxford, 1998). The series was exhibited at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1998.
In his show at Michael Stevenson in January/February 2008, photographs from various essays undertaken in the years of apartheid are paired with photographs from his post-apartheid work. The resulting many-layered dynamic might be regarded as a meditation on continuity and change in South Africa. It also clearly reveals the connectedness of vision and thought that runs through all of Goldblatt's work - early and recent, black-and-white and colour.
Structures, a focus of Goldblatt's photography, are invariably embedded with the values and ideologies of their makers, and this is most clearly evident in monuments, memorials and places of worship. In South Africa many of these structures are interesting in their awkwardness. As Goldblatt articulates:
South Africa is not a society in which expression has been muted by obfuscating encrustations of centuries of art and refinement. Even when we attempt symbolism it has the quality of clumsy transparency rather than dissimulation. Our structures often declare quite nakedly, yet eloquently, what manner of people built them, and what they stood for. There was - and is - a rawness to the forces at work here that is evidenced in much of what we have built.' (South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, p11)
Goldblatt concluded his introduction to South Africa: The Structure of Things Then by looking forward: 'We are in a new time. What its values and spirit will be and how these will be expressed and evidenced in the structures brought forth has hardly begun to emerge' (p20). In his colour work of recent years Goldblatt witnesses the shifts in power and changing perceptions of history that have emerged and continue to manifest themselves through structures - some neglected, some reconfigured, and some newly constructed.
The second body of work on exhibition is a series of triptychs in which complexities of time, space and meaning surrounding a number of subjects are explored through their three intimate yet separate images.
Goldblatt has been critically exploring South African society through his photographs for more than half a century, has published a number of books and has received international recognition for his work. His retrospective, David Goldblatt: Fifty-one years, toured galleries and museums in New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg between 2001 and 2005. He won the 2006 Hasselblad Award in recognition of his lifelong achievements.