The retrospective of David Goldblatt's photographic work, »Fifty-one Years«, which took place in Rotterdam's Witte de With, was refreshing in its semantic cohesiveness. Small to mid-sized photos, arranged in fourteen series, could be viewed in eight rooms. Each of these series, comprised of up to thirty pictures, was introduced with a title and short text, while each of the photos, all in black and white, was given its own subtitle. In addition, display cases presented periodicals such as »Optima,« »Time Magazine« or »Leadership,« in order to indicate where and how the photo series had been published.

This arrangement gave rise to the question of whether an installation of this kind might not create too homogenous an effect, because the chosen staging inevitably made Goldblatt's biography and oeuvre coincide with the era of apartheid in South Africa. The earliest photos, the »Earlies«, were made in 1948, when Goldblatt graduated from school, the year in which the National Party won the election, bringing about the decisive turning point after which a tightening of the existing race laws led to apartheid. The most recent photos in the exhibit (»Structures«) were made in 1999, that is, five years after the first general election and Nelson Mandela's inauguration. In the period in-between, the conventions of racist segregation policies were elevated to the status of law, leading to extreme economic, territorial and political consequences.

Due to the formal conformity imposed on the works in the exhibit and the way they are lined up next to one another, one could easily get the impression that the arrangement manifested a master plan, which Goldblatt, in his exploration of apartheid, merely needed to follow. It thus seemed advisable to reverse the line of vision in the exhibit as rapidly as possible - because Goldblatt's position is much less deductive than inductive. If one is unable to follow his thought process, justice cannot be done to the fine differentiation accomplished by one photo or series of photos within the context of Goldblatt's work.

Apartheid is not reconstructed here in the form of an »atlas« following the systematics of segregation. As far as apartheid is concerned, many of the series prove to be a kind of helpful construction, with heterogeneous lines of examination that are at times drawn at right angles to the apartheid system. The series »Shaftsinking« (1969/70), for instance, concentrates with its eight photos on a single working process: the descent, blasting, and the transport of broken rocks from the depths of a gold mine shaft. This excerpt visualizes one extreme dictated by work conditions, while at the same time making reference to the origin of Johannesburg's economic ascent following the discovery of gold and diamonds around 1880. By contrast, in »On the Mines« (1965-69) Goldblatt succeeds in achieving a differentiation comparable to the research of Allan Sekula, analyzing the larger social and labor context and the implications of a society in which gold mines play a major role. In the series »South Africa: The Structures of Things« (1984-89), monuments and architecture, but also disparate everyday situations, provide telling parallels with regard to conditions and values of »white« history in South Africa.

If one views only individual pictures, Goldblatt's description of the subject construction in his documentary photography becomes intriguing: »When I'm photographing somebody I try to make a situation or move into a situation in which he will reveal himself. I'm not creating a situation, I'm exposing a situation.« (Frederico Freschi & Marlene Kapitza-Meyer) This method is most evident in »Jo'burg Intersections: Suburbs,« where, in frontal portraits of white or black South Africans, Goldblatt tries to plumb the space surrounding them to glean its specific social context. In »Waitress, Bezuidenhout Park, November 73,« a black waitress stands in a restaurant in front of a wall decorated with pictures and »Merry Christmas« decorations and hesitantly presents the menu. She is standing under an oil painting of a white maid with a fruit basket. Both of the women portrayed smile in the direction of the camera. In the context of the picture, the hesitant smile of the waitress makes reference to the self-consciousness of a maid, to »blackness« and the possibility of making insinuations about these assumptions. Directly adjacent is another photo, »Sylvia Gibbert in her Apartment, Melrose, October 1974«, which also takes up the picture-within-a-picture structure: an expressively painted nude hangs next to the bed over the lamp on the nightstand. On the bed a woman is comfortably lounging against the headrest. Her ladylike, elegant pose clearly indicates that the selection of the nude picture suits her own tastes.

The title »Margaret Maroney: sentenced to R100 or 50 days imprisonment suspended for 3 years for living in this flat in a White Group Area, Orian Court Bree Street, December 1981« is the only thing about the portrait of a seemingly relaxed family that provides important supplementary information on their precarious housing situation. Sitting on the bed, covered up with a blanket, with their upper bodies leaning against the wall behind, the family looks up at us from its apparently normal living situation. The man is almost smiling, the woman's expression is composed, the two children look on with interest.

The actual situation becomes evident only from the title: the family has broken the law by going against the Group Area Act and holding out in an apartment forbidden to »Indian« families. Out of the supposed »normality,« an element of pride emerges for having held on to this refuge. By repeating the same title information, save the names, in three different portrait situations, Goldblatt suggests the dimensions of this law, which conceived living areas in accordance with racial segregation and left a wave of massive resettlement in its wake. This is just one example of the precision and diversity of the titles, which Goldblatt uses to link information with the individual images.

The photo »The Cross Roads People's Park, constructed by young 'comrades' during the time of popular resistance to apartheid, later destroyed by the security forces, Oukasie, Brits, Transvaal, 22.11.1986« is part of the »Structures« series. In the foreground of a square in a rural area, a cannon has been formed out of bundles of straw, wheel rims and pine cones. On the other side of the square the viewer can see a sign: »We are the world/ We are the children,« a quote from the famous »USA-for-Africa« song. In the background sits a group of young black South Africans, who look up as if calculating their own options for taking action and those of their opponent.

This photo is one of just three in the entire exhibition that show reactions resisting apartheid. It is surprising that Goldblatt practically neglects to make any attempt at visualizing the political movements that arose within the apartheid system. He makes reference neither to the campaign to disregard apartheid proclaimed by the ANC during the fifties, nor to the burning of passports; nor is there any hint in the »Soweto« series of the uprisings that took place there. These omissions suggest an almost claustrophobic homogeneity of apartheid. At the same time, the formally uniform handling of the photos, which arose out of so many different contexts, give the exhibition something of the ahistorical. In the sequence in which the series are arranged, no chronology in a sense of ongoing change can be perceived. Seen in this way, Goldblatt seems to entrench the image of apartheid - despite the various means he uses to emphasize distinctions.

Photos made subsequently to those shown in Rotterdam were exhibited at Documenta 11. It was almost as if, after the conclusion of the exhibition (and life's) project »Fifty-one Years (Apartheid),« a new beginning was to be made. Goldblatt uses color photography here for the first time. He justified this step by explaining that he decided to take up color photography as soon as the advent of digital processing methods could give him a degree of control similar to that exercised when developing black-and-white negatives. Accordingly, prints are exhibited here in which digital modification of some details is noticeable.

Under the title »Jo'burg Intersections (1999-2002),« a number of individual images as well as two color image sequences are shown: »Casino Complex at Fourways: Monte Casino, Johannesburg, 26 September 2001« and a series on the development of the Dainfern Valley. Both photo series were partially or wholly shot from the air. Both recall the aesthetics of advertising brochures - and, in addition to the usual picture titles with accompanying texts within the picture, introduce a further level to the composition of the pictures. The series extend over a privatized and socially closed-off zone. The territorially extended segregation in Johannesburg during apartheid, which the Rotterdam series follow, is opposed here by an island-shaped segregation unit. As if wanting to make tangible on a formal level the claustrophobic distress of the situation depicted in the photos, the pictures in the series are hung closely together, with frames almost touching. At the same time, the architecture represented, though divided into multiple facets by the individual images, spreads over the line of images to converge into a »fortress-like« panorama.

For the Casino complex, an entire small neo-Tuscan town from early colonial times was turned into a kind of event architecture by means of a gigantic glass and parking-lot construction. One has to examine the photos a long time before being sure that it is not all just a digital simulation. And then one is still unsure which parts of the mock Tuscan architecture were added in order to increase the backdrop effect. The dimensions irritate as well, until it is noticed that - due to the gradual shifting of perspective from one standpoint - the building complex in the background is doubled and the towers »repeat.« The lack of people in this scene further increases the artificial character. The announcement »Welcome to Monte Casino, a Tuscan Village under the Roof, Monte Casino Publicity Brochure« tends to be read only later, since it is located to the right of the print sequence. The reality of the building, of which one can hardly be sure when looking at it, what with all of its dystopias, hybridness and distortion, is slowly transformed into the conviction that one is faced with a commercial monstrosity.

In these two series, but in the other photos as well, which present themselves as isolated views of Johannesburg without any connecting line of inquiry, one can sense a shifting of Goldblatt's position. The involvement is more transient and the confrontation with the commercial segregation of Johannesburg following apartheid, which in the interim has spread to become global, seems more abstract.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

---