David Goldblatt (South Africa 1930-2018), Woman collecting shellfish. Port St Johns, Transkei, 1975 (from the Particulars series) ,1975
Provenance : Courtesy David Goldblatt Legacy Trust
Exhibited :
Literature :
Notes : David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg. He began exploring the medium of photography after matriculating in 1948 but only formally made photography his profession after his father died in 1962 and the family business, a mining concession store, was sold. In the years that followed, while Goldblatt supported his family through photography commissions and magazine work, he produced more than ten major photographic series documenting the people, landscapes, and structures of South Africa. Goldblatt founded the Market Photo Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg for aspiring photographers, in 1989. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A retrospective of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years, began an international tour of galleries and museums in 2001. Goldblatt was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York. His work was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has featured on shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Barbican Centre in London. In 2017, Goldblatt installed a series of portraits from his photographic essay, Ex-Offenders, in former prisons in Birmingham and Manchester. The portraits depict men and women, from South Africa and the UK, at the scene of their crimes, with accompanying texts that relate the subjects’ stories in their words. In the last year of his life, two major retrospectives were opened at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award, and was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France in 2016. “In the early 1970s I photographed many people in our gold and platinum mines and in the townships and suburbs of Johannesburg. These were mostly portraits, quite formal encounters between the subjects and me, in which I was often intensely conscious of details: folds of flesh, the weight of limbs, roughness of hands, length of fingers, movement of a tendon in a foot, the drape of cloth on hip or breast, repose and tension. Such awareness was part of the making of portraits. But then I found that it was the thing itself. For about six months in 1975 I became completely absorbed in exploring something that I had possibly had since childhood – a certain way of knowing our bodies; a heightened awareness of our particulars. Since then, while that sense of our bodies is nearly always there, I have only occasionally tried to touch it in photographs.” The photographs in Particulars were taken beginning in 1975, and the first edition of the book was published by Goodman Gallery (2003). Goldblatt revised Particulars for a new publication by Steidl (2014).
Condition_report : The overall condition is excellent.
