David Goldblatt

Goldblatt died on 25 June 2018 in Johannesburg from cancer. He had created photographs up until his death. He was survived by his wife, Lily Goldblatt, children Steven, Brenda, and Ronnie, and two grandchildren.

During Apartheid, Goldblatt in his work The Transported of KwaNdebele documented the excruciatingly long and uncomfortable twice-daily bus journeys of black workers who lived in the segregated "homelands" northeast of Pretoria. The conditions had not changed that much for workers by 2007: "The bulk of people who live there still have to travel to Pretoria by road. It's still a very long commute for them every day – two to eight hours. . . . It will take generations to undo the consequences of Apartheid."

Interest in Goldblatt's work increased significantly after a travelling exhibition of 51 years of his work (Barcelona, 2001), and the eleventh Documenta (Kassel, 2002). The former, which opened in the AXA Gallery in New York in 2001, offered an overview of Goldblatt's photographic oeuvre from 1948 to 1999. At Documenta, two projects were shown: black-and-white work depicting life in the middle-class white community of Boksburg in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as examples of later colour work from the series Johannesburg Intersections.

Goldblatt's book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, published in 1998, offers an in-depth visual analysis of the relationship between South Africa's structures and the forces that shaped them, from the country's early colonial beginnings up until 1990.

In the work Goldblatt created during apartheid he never photographed in colour. Goldblatt observed that: "the use of colour during apartheid would have been inappropriate. It would have enhanced the beautiful and the personal, whereas black and white photographs to more effectively documented the external dramatic contradictions that defined this earlier period." In the 1990s he began working in colour, in a sense adapting to the digital age. "I’ve found the venture into color quite exciting . . . largely because new technology has enabled me to work with color on the computer as I have done with black and white in the darkroom." It was only after working on a project involving blue asbestos in north-western Australia, and "the resulting disease and death", that he "got hooked on doing work in color [because] You can’t make it blue in black and white."

After founding the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 1989, Goldblatt turned no photographer, struggling or famous, away from his door. He was always accessible to everyone no matter what, even in his later life.

In the 1970s, Goldblatt documented one of the many injustices of the Apartheid South African government in a series of photographs of houses, shops and other types of architecture in the Johannesburg suburb, Pageview. The Group Areas Act of 1950 displaced much of the local population in favor of white South Africans. Goldblatt documented the local population's demonstrations of resistance and determination through their persistent occupation of their homes and businesses—regardless of the damage done.

Goldblatt began photographing when he was a teenager. He got his first camera from his father, who bought it from Goldblatt's brother, who had brought home a damaged German Contax camera when he came back from serving in World War II. Though his first photographs were not groundbreaking, he enlisted help from a wedding photographer: "He would drape several cameras around my neck so that I looked very professional, and my job was to ensure that no guest with a good camera got a good picture . . . I would have to bump or walk in front of them at the critical moment so that my boss was the only person who ended up with good photographs.” A couple years later in 1963, as his skill developed, he sold the clothing shop that he had taken over on the death of his father in 1962, and became a full-time photographer. He documented developments in South Africa through the period of apartheid until it ended in the 1990s. However he was still making photographs up until his death in 2018.

David Goldblatt HonFRPS (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." He has numerous publications to his name.

Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province, and was the youngest of the three sons of Eli and Olga Goldblatt. His grandparents arrived in South Africa from Lithuania around 1893, having fled the persecution of Jews there.