David Goldblatt
A farmer's son with his nursemaid is a tender portrait of an intimacy that will not last. The two figures, a boy and the young woman who cares for him, touch each other with warm familiarity. Their gestures appear absent-minded and second nature, like those between a mother and her child. The farmer’s son rests his hands on his nursemaid’s shoulders and leans his weight against her. As if in answer, her hand reaches back to hold his heel. Their affection, the sweetness of the scene, is overshadowed by the knowledge of their difference. He is white, an Afrikaner, and she is black, designated second class. Soon, such intimacy will be discouraged and later disallowed entirely. The boy will grow from child to baas (to boss, then the term of address for Afrikaans men), and she from childhood companion to childhood memory. A distance will grow between them, as the times then dictated.
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).