Goldblatt,
directed by Daniel Zimbler.
Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival, 2017.
In the 1970s, in the thick of apartheid, the South African photographer David Goldblatt set about capturing daily life in places where, he remarks, “a white man…attracted a great deal of attention, from both the populace and the security police.” Already he had found himself subject to interrogation, off and on; he remembers being brought in once and asked whether he could really be a “loyal South African,” seeing as he was a Jew. As he trained his lens on Soweto, Transkei, Fietas—places designated for particular ethnicities under the Group Areas Act, under which millions of people were forcibly relocated—Goldblatt chose not to photograph furtively in the hope of escaping such scrutiny. His art, subtle in its particulars and searching in its patience, would not have allowed that. “I adopted a slow and formal photography,” he says of that period. “No shooting from the hip; the camera invariably on a tripod, everything upfront and transparent. Ordinary onlookers soon got bored, while the police seemed not to know what to make of the sheer banality of what I was doing.”
What might have been “sheer banality” to the policeman becomes, to the observer lifted out of ordinary time, nothing less than a documentary record of human depths. A young woman of Indian descent stands behind the counter in her parents’ shop, as the caption tells us, “before its destruction under the Group Areas Act.” Sadly alert to this moment, holding the photographer’s gaze, she is still touchingly self-absenting. A municipal official in his early thirties, a lonely functionary of the apartheid state, smokes a cigarette in his spartan bedsit. A black man holds up his dompas—a passport-like document permitting travel through white areas on the way to and from the black townships—with an arch and disorienting delicacy, as if this imposition of the state were some fine possession. There is a charge, all the same, in the way he presents it for the white photographer’s inspection: if we are freed, in such moments of knowing exchange, from social conventions, it is never by a great enough margin to be easy in our ironies. Perhaps you feel this because of the way his friend, leaning in with a brotherly closeness, sizes Goldblatt up, as if keeping him at bay.
The visible distance Goldblatt kept from the so-called struggle artists—those who brought the haunting news of apartheid to the world by adopting a more plainly photojournalistic approach—often opened him up to controversy, as when the African National Congress imposed a boycott of his photographs on the grounds that he had done work for the Anglo American Corporation. “My work was political—there’s no question it was—but I wasn’t on the scene at the riots,” he says in Daniel Zimbler’s deftly made and quietly affecting documentary, which takes after its subject in offering us a portrait that is, in equal parts, reticent and revelatory. We watch Goldblatt hard at work on new photographs and hard at thought on old ones, with the benefit of commentary from contemporaries such as Nadine Gordimer and William Kentridge as well as members of the younger generation. To spend time, courtesy of the film, in Goldblatt’s presence—he is now in his eighty-seventh year—is to encounter a man whose uncompromising commitment to his art is inflected by an air of melancholy self-knowledge. “I gradually realized that events themselves were to me much less interesting than the conditions that led to the events,” he says. “I was looking obliquely at things.” Zimbler’s film helps bring home that this artist of indelible dispassion is, simultaneously, a visionary of intimate humanity, one whose photographs are defined not only by the distances they sometimes keep but by the rare depths they discover.
Goldblatt, born in 1930, turned eighteen just as apartheid came into force, after the postwar ascendancy of the National Party—a bitter turn for a country that had joined the Allies in World War II. One of his brothers had been a radio operator in the merchant navy; another had joined the air force and then the army engineers. Goldblatt recalls the shock and dismay of many at the time: “Surely our men who had gone ‘up north,’ fought in the desert and in Italy, the men who had spent years in prisoner of war camps, would not tolerate anything less” than an end to oppression in their home country. Instead, apartheid—the Afrikaner word for apartness—intensified the conditions of racial, political, and economic oppression that had long been a lived reality in South Africa. “It denied us the experience of each other’s lives,” he says in the film. From his childhood home in Randfontein, the young Goldblatt saw blacks paraded across the veld toward the local Magistrate’s Court. In his youth, it sometimes fell to him to sign the pass authorizing his nanny, Martha Mopeloa, to travel after the daily curfew. (In conversation, he corrected me when I referred to her as a second mother of sorts: “Not ‘of sorts.’ A real second mother.”) He recoils at the memory of signing her pass, at the sheer unnaturalness and indignity of this arrangement. “I can’t tell you how ashamed I felt, having to do that for her,” he tells Zimbler. Her presence can be felt in one of his most moving portraits, in which a young white boy, standing, places his hand on his nanny’s shoulder in loving possession. Power, even in innocence, is at work here, but any such impression is softened by their kindred expressions, and all but erased when you spot her hand curled behind his foot: a reciprocal gesture that asserts, in this moment, a touching equality of feeling.
In explaining the emergence of an art that, as he says in the film, “was often quite lonely,” Goldblatt has remarked that he “was never a joiner.” But this was a matter of biography before it became one of temperament. The son of a shopkeeper whose own father was a Jewish émigré from Lithuania, he lacked the sense of entitlement enjoyed by the dominant Afrikaner people—whites, mainly of Dutch descent, who propagated a triumphal Christian nationalism in the apartheid years, and who bore the sense, as he puts it, “of knowing who you are and what you are and that this is your place.” To come into contact with working-class Afrikaners while helping out in his father’s shop was to receive an early lesson in irresolvable human contradiction. “I had to learn to speak with these people—almost against my will,” Goldblatt says. “And yet I knew that they were racist in their blood. And yet I couldn’t deny the warmth and generosity of many of them.”
Goldblatt’s photographs have a way of giving rise to such accumulating and yets. Two Afrikaner brothers who, the caption tells us, have challenged the photographer to a shooting competition turn away from their targets to take him in with an easy warmth. But those are guns all the same; how many in South Africa would have been able to look on them without wariness? In the film, Goldblatt memorably describes the making of an especially tense image:
I was photographing in Pretoria, on Church Square, when into my viewfinder came a police squad car. The policeman sitting in the back glared out at me. I almost instinctively photographed him. But at the same time, I was very aware of people behind the policeman, a row of solid white citizens standing in a bus queue. And I see myself in that bus queue being protected by that very policeman’s gun.
“I almost instinctively photographed him”: dispassion, then, only in the sense of unshakeable self-command. You see this same quality, in both photographer and subject, in Goldblatt’s portrait of a young black man “after his assault and detention by the Security Police.” His arms in white casts, he looks at us with plain insistence, demanding that we at least return the gesture. He knows—and seems already wearied by—the terrible eloquence of his body, asserted as evidence; there is no need to say anything else.
“Photography,” Goldblatt says, searching among approximations, “has been to me a vehicle, or a justification, or a reason, or a license, for doing things that were otherwise impermissible or not easy in our society.” We watch him, in late age, climb atop his camper to capture the burned-out house of a corrupt ANC chief, having been denied access to the residence. This is photography absolutely equal, in the moment, to the glare of that policeman on Church Square. Which isn’t to say that Goldblatt merely looks back in kind—not when oppressed consciousness sees him self-divided among those “solid white citizens,” a phrase whose bitter irony reminds us that any photograph is a host of appearances demanding an informed and conscientious viewer.
Now and again, Goldblatt has expressed skepticism that those outside of South Africa could ever fully appreciate his art, in that particular sense where admiration meets a textured, almost intuitive understanding. Can such an understanding come from anything other than lived experience? As he asks in a searching preface to some of his photographs of the 1970s, “How can anyone not steeped in the life, ways, obsessions, graces, laws and particulars of this place and people, discern what is embedded of us even in these pale rubbings.” It is a line of speculation that extends to the very potential of the medium. In the film, years later, he sounds a similar note:
I decided a long time ago that I actually was not interested in talking to people outside South Africa, to non–South Africans. So much of what I was interested in doing was about us. You had to be one of us to disentangle what was embedded in the photograph.
This use of “us”—an “us” that transcends race and yet stops stubbornly at the bounds of a nation, a shared history—is fraught with eloquence, and deeply moving when you consider that in this case it does not issue from a denial of the narrower “us” in which Goldblatt, as a white South African, must place himself all the same. He does as much when he says explicitly that his portraits of Afrikaners were born of the hope that this work might “percolate into white minds” and become “a mirror held up to ourselves,” a formulation which sees him as both the holder of the mirror and one of those reflected. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, he tracks down the Soweto home of a woman named Queen Monyeki, years after first taking her picture. In the interim, we learn, she has lost two children to AIDS. He’d like to photograph her by her stove. She objects, first to the location (the stove is broken), then to the whole transaction. There is, in Goldblatt’s earnest apologia, a disarming hint of irony: “I show how life looks here.” Monyeki: “But you take our photos, you give us nothing. Fifty rand or something, but—nothing.” So the photographer agrees on a modest concession. As she stands there before his camera, Monyeki reminds him, “You can take only one photo, sir.” Watching the exchange unfold allows us to see, beneath these gestures of guarded self-assertion, something that approaches affection.
Goldblatt has never failed to think and think again about clicking the shutter; he has not worked with ease. In an extraordinary, un-self-forgiving aside, all while busily sorting out some equipment, he tells Zimbler that, no, he has not achieved what he set out to, disclaiming his own work as “partial and on the whole superficial… I knew there were much deeper levels to which I should have penetrated somehow. But I didn’t know how.” The ambition to penetrate more deeply finds literal expression in the collection On the Mines, for which he joined a team of shaftsinkers in their downward passage; he came back with hauntingly beautiful pictures of men who verge, in their perilous work, on an apparitional state of being. For The Transported of KwaNdebele, an extraordinary project of participant-witness that trades on the various resonances of the word transport, he joined those forced to make the exhausting, twice-daily trip by bus between the townships and their work in white areas. The photographs are at once ordinary and otherworldly in their intensity; Goldblatt calls the experience one of the most moving of his life.
If he has been unstinting in the pursuit of his work, he nonetheless broods in the film on “that fine sense of whether to photograph something,” drawing out the word fine so that you hear in it not the preciousness of the aesthete but real moral scruple: “I keep questioning it,” he says. “I often make mistakes.” When I asked Goldblatt if he might expand upon this point, he responded in a language of rational calculation:
This is perhaps the most crucial decision of all that one makes in making photographs and it crops up in all sorts of situations: To start with I need something outside my own inside to start the process of interest/instigation/provocation/ irritation which might lead to the wish to photograph “it.” But in deciding whether to commit to “it” there are or may be reasons for doubt. Is it really as exciting, irritating, provocative as at first appeared? Are there sensitive issues here that I would rather not intrude upon or violate or be in conflict with? In true conformity with the economist’s “person” I must rank these factors and plainly, if there is a positive outcome I might persuade myself that it’s good to go.
These well-compassed doubts might blind us to the sense of urgency that has guided Goldblatt’s moral searching early and late—a quality the film brings out in abundance. Often he recalls some next photographic project as having been an instinctive leap, a way out of unbearable difficulty. This, for instance, is how he remembers arriving at a project on middle-class life in a white town similar to the one in which he grew up: “I often didn’t know how to respond. I was in despair. Apartheid seemed to be rampant and unbreakable and unstoppable. I— I went to Boksburg.” That pause resonates. In much the same way, Gold-blatt says he began photographing Afrikaners “almost without thinking,” having been moved to do so precisely because their contradictions defeated understanding. In neither case do we hear “the economist’s ‘person’” speaking, and it bears saying that if an artist ever did get in true conformity with such a construct, we would no longer have the benefit of his or her art. The provocations and irritations that give rise to the art-making impulse only ever act on someone possessed of a particular history, set of concerns, and way of seeing. “Usually I prefer the people I photograph to be somewhat tense and even ill at ease,” Goldblatt told me, interested—individual that he is—in conditions under which individuals might reveal themselves.
And yet the ambition to capture a person’s presence in its fullness goes hand in hand, in his work, with a sustained effort to shed light on the social conditions, the structures and values that individuals alternately reflect and resist. An extraordinary portrait whose very title, matter of fact as it is, bears the impress of this dual ambition is Philamon Mabunda, flat cleaner, Geraldine Court, Hillbrow, July 1972. The picture was done, Goldblatt told me, in “a narrow lane between the backs of buildings down which the collectors of night soil used to take their muled carts,” before there was water-borne sewerage. Mabunda looks into the lens with nervousness and hope and, it seems, a flicker of fear. He is not quite sure he is occasion enough for a picture. His hands are clasped, nearly clenched: some part of him, you sense, wants this moment to pass. Still, he is uplifted by this act of attention, uncommon as it must be. What you see is a humility so piercing that humiliation, that far different thing, suggests itself: the humiliation of a man reduced in apartheid South Africa to the fixed character of “flat cleaner.” What Goldblatt’s picture records is the presence of someone who is manifestly more than that (who has, to begin with, a name), and yet is so deeply conditioned by being seen in a single dimension that you feel the burden of the socially imposed self, the impossibility of getting away from what the world sees, even in the determinedly humane moment of this picture’s making.
Goldblatt too has wished to get away from history. Yet he has gone on recording its impress with painstaking and expansive attention, as in his photographs of the structures, literal and otherwise, of South Africa over the forty-odd years of the apartheid era—churches, memorials, maids’ quarters, and so on. The Structure of Things Then, the resulting collection, ends on a note of elemental hope, of newfound freedom, with the photo A man building his house on his own plot of ground, Marselle Township, Kenton-on-Sea, Eastern Cape, 8 July 1990. A similarly hard-won moment appears at the end of Zimbler’s film, where we find the photographer on the Karoo, the vast semi-desert that covers roughly a third of South Africa. There is a great deal of looking, of silence. “The light is not inviting us in,” Goldblatt judges after a time: there will be no picture. But a moment later some new seeing is possible, and once more there’s the click of the shutter. It’s a tribute to the film that, though it cannot really invite you into this moment of creation, you find yourself absorbed by this outwardly uneventful and deeply important drama, sensing that it is only out of such small, determined victories that a life in the art can be made.
Tomas Unger lives in New York.
