David Goldblatt; South African 1930-2018; Picnic at Hartebeespoort Dam on New Year's Day, Transvaal (North-West Province), 1965
Provenance : Acquired from the artist by the current owner, 17 September 2004.
Exhibited : Stevenson, Johannesburg, Some Afrikaners Revisited, 24 October to 25 November 2006, another example exhibited. Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, On Common Ground, 28 July to 25 August 2018, another example exhibited.
Literature : David Goldblatt (1975) Some Afrikaners Photographed, Cape Town: Murray Crawford, another example illustrated. Ivor Powell, David Goldblatt and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska (2008) David Goldblatt: Structures of Dominion and Democracy, Centre Pompidou: Steidl, another example illustrated. Goodman Gallery (2010) David Goldblatt: Kith, Kin and Khaya - South African Photographs, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: Goodman Editions, another example illustrated on page 58, with the title Haartebeespoort.
Notes : "When Goldblatt first published his photographic essay on Afrikaners in 1968, a national newspaper ran an article on the front page with the title Bloed sal kook oor dié fotos (Blood will boil over these photographs). The point of contention was curious: that a man would dare photograph a farmer in a sweat-stained hat and another unshaven. This, Goldblatt said, was the principal sin, the undermining of the nationalist vision of ordentlike people, a word which finds no easy translation in English and rests somewhere between proper, decent and respectable. No doubt this photograph, Picnic at Hartebeespoort Dam, would have similarly set the blood boiling. A woman's shoe lies in the foreground, the blankets are crumpled and marked with grass and a child sleeps in only his swimming shorts. Sitting beside the cardboard box that serves as picnic basket, an older boy dispatches his infant sibling with a toy gun." 1. A4 Arts Foundation (no date) David Goldblatt: Picnic at Hartebeespoort Dam on New Year's Day, Transvaal (North-West Province), 1965, online, https://www.a4arts.org/works/rec36AwwbrqiFJhsw-picnic-at-hartebeespoort-dam-on-new-year-s-day-transvaal-north-west-province-1965, accessed 29 May 2025.
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