David Goldblatt
Under the 1950 Group Areas Act, the apartheid government began forcibly moving people of colour from their homes to segregated areas beyond city limits. Existing houses in newly-declared white areas were earmarked for demolition and whole neighbourhoods razed – the land purged not only of its previous inhabitants but any remnant of them. This legislated violence not only affected the social and real landscape of the country, which has yet to recover from the devastating effects of apartheid’s spatial legacy, but millions of individual lives. Goldblatt’s Luke Kgatitsoe in his house recalls one such life, soon after his home was reduced to rubble.
This photograph is included in The Structure of Things Then, 1998; Fifty-one Years, 2001; Kith Kin & Khaya, 2011; and Structures of Dominion and Democracy, 2018.
b.1930, Randfontein; d.2018, Johannesburg
“I was drawn,” the late photographer David Goldblatt wrote, “not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” A preeminent chronicler of South African life under apartheid and after, Goldblatt bore witness to how this life is written on the land, in its structures or their absence. Unconcerned with documenting significant historic moments, his photographs stand outside the events of the time and yet are eloquent of them. Through Goldblatt’s lens, the prosaic reveals a telling poignancy. Even in those images that appear benign, much is latent in them – histories and politics, desires and dread. His photographs are quietly critical reflections on the values and conditions that have shaped the country; those structures both ideological and tangible. Among his most notable photobooks are On the Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), In Boksburg (1982), The Structure of Things Then (1998), and Particulars (2003).