WEBVTT 00:00:25.334 --> 00:00:27.909 DAVID GOLDBLATT: The camera is a very strange instrument. 00:00:30.322 --> 00:00:33.667 It demands first of all, that you see coherently, 00:00:34.899 --> 00:00:41.161 it makes it possible for you to enter into worlds, and places, and associations, 00:00:41.161 --> 00:00:43.975 that would otherwise be very difficult to do. 00:00:54.661 --> 00:00:57.292 Being a photographer is a wonderful thing, really. 00:01:02.070 --> 00:01:03.850 I'm not tied to any place. 00:01:04.831 --> 00:01:06.529 I can go and come as I like. 00:01:10.049 --> 00:01:10.549 It's wonderful. 00:01:14.141 --> 00:01:18.000 My childhood years in Johannesburg were very happy. 00:01:19.450 --> 00:01:21.627 We enjoyed an enormous amount of freedom. 00:01:22.909 --> 00:01:29.850 We would ride our bicycles all over the Randfontein Estates, which was the goldmine around the town, 00:01:30.479 --> 00:01:33.743 and we could explore the mines to a great degree. 00:01:36.207 --> 00:01:42.000 It's a brutal landscape, it's very bare, bleak, we don't have a sea, we don’t have a big river. 00:01:42.457 --> 00:01:46.590 We just had these rather dull and uninteresting spaces. 00:01:48.049 --> 00:01:52.804 I think there was a kind of osmosis taking place in me, 00:01:53.408 --> 00:01:56.509 I became organically related to the place. 00:01:59.626 --> 00:02:04.071 On the one hand, I want to photograph the land. 00:02:05.202 --> 00:02:08.163 Land, in a very broad sense. 00:02:09.153 --> 00:02:15.708 On the other hand, I'm fascinated by our structures as declarations of value. 00:02:21.214 --> 00:02:25.518 I'm too late for this photograph, the trees are already in leaf. 00:02:26.473 --> 00:02:27.404 I’m going to try. 00:02:27.404 --> 00:02:28.143 Let's have a look. 00:02:31.110 --> 00:02:36.918 It seems to me that the style of architecture that is emerging to the north of Johannesburg, 00:02:37.640 --> 00:02:40.587 is a kind of an aggressive materialism. 00:02:47.149 --> 00:02:53.970 In this country, because of the nakedness, almost, of the struggles that took place between 00:02:53.970 --> 00:02:55.400 black and white, 00:02:55.400 --> 00:03:02.391 the structures that emerged were amazingly clear demonstrations of value systems. 00:03:03.572 --> 00:03:07.882 White Afrikaner Protestant churches are those that I think of particularly. 00:03:09.341 --> 00:03:13.251 Their churches had these huge windows and this mega phonic structure, 00:03:14.168 --> 00:03:20.157 come the 1970s the forces of liberation are coming down to South Africa, 00:03:20.459 --> 00:03:23.830 increasingly impinging on Afrikaners. 00:03:25.188 --> 00:03:28.250 So, their new churches become defensive. 00:03:29.884 --> 00:03:33.464 There are very few of them built with piercings in the outer walls. 00:03:35.098 --> 00:03:40.714 Public structures become clear manifestations to self-image. 00:03:45.079 --> 00:03:51.129 Look at this, look at this, huge building, but at least this has got a certain amount 00:03:51.129 --> 00:03:53.240 of movement. 00:04:01.310 --> 00:04:02.952 That’s a Hasselblad. 00:04:04.109 --> 00:04:09.126 Famous, very expensive, beautifully built box. 00:04:10.459 --> 00:04:16.380 My brother Dan would come back from somewhere in the world and bring little miniature cameras. 00:04:17.235 --> 00:04:21.450 He brought back from one of his voyages a Contax camera. 00:04:21.450 --> 00:04:24.809 The Contax was the Zeiss equivalent of the Leica. 00:04:24.809 --> 00:04:29.770 It was a great camera, but this particular one had been severely damaged. 00:04:29.770 --> 00:04:33.510 I don't know what its history was during the war, but when it eventually reached Randfontein, 00:04:33.510 --> 00:04:38.376 it was a very sick camera, but I tried to do some photography with it. 00:04:39.709 --> 00:04:45.879 When I matriculated in '48, I certainly had a strong wish to become a magazine photographer. 00:04:46.507 --> 00:04:51.484 “Life” and “Look from America,” “Picture Post” from England were the 00:04:51.484 --> 00:04:54.100 window on the world for millions. 00:04:55.458 --> 00:05:04.600 In 1952, I think it was, the apartheid government had begun to put its ideology in place and 00:05:04.600 --> 00:05:10.620 one of the first steps was to separate the races in public amenities. 00:05:12.000 --> 00:05:19.340 I did a short strip of film of a black man going up and then being turned back by a black policeman. 00:05:19.692 --> 00:05:24.660 He had been accustomed to taking that route into the Johannesburg railway station and 00:05:24.660 --> 00:05:26.620 suddenly he was not allowed to. 00:05:26.620 --> 00:05:31.759 So I sent a strip of those photographs to “Picture Post” to the editor. 00:05:31.759 --> 00:05:33.477 I was politely rejected. 00:05:36.620 --> 00:05:42.440 I tried to do a magazine story about the men who worked on top of the mine dumps around 00:05:42.440 --> 00:05:43.776 our town. 00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:49.910 These men worked right through the year, every day and night, 00:05:49.910 --> 00:05:55.251 no matter what the conditions, dealing with the waste of the milling operation. 00:05:56.709 --> 00:06:00.000 We were subjecting these men to a terrible existence. 00:06:01.240 --> 00:06:03.878 It is freezing cold on the top of those dumps in winter. 00:06:07.498 --> 00:06:08.450 Here's an old dump. 00:06:09.707 --> 00:06:13.111 It's been covered in grass to keep down the dust. 00:06:16.430 --> 00:06:25.050 Black miners could not rise beyond the level of what were known as boss boys or team leaders. 00:06:26.458 --> 00:06:28.622 Of course, they were not boys, they were men. 00:06:30.910 --> 00:06:36.138 In order to rise above that level, you had to have a blasting certificate, 00:06:36.440 --> 00:06:41.460 and this was a method that was used by the white trade unions to ensure that 00:06:41.460 --> 00:06:47.374 only whites could go into the upper echelons of the mining hierarchy. 00:06:52.654 --> 00:06:54.900 If one wanted to look at this society, 00:06:54.900 --> 00:07:01.480 you had to grasp the nature of white Afrikaner life and ideology. 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:13.500 The Afrikaners were descended from the Dutch and French Huguenot, and German, Scotch, early, 00:07:13.500 --> 00:07:15.900 early settlers in this country. 00:07:15.900 --> 00:07:21.430 Small as that group was, they determined a great deal of what happened here. 00:07:21.430 --> 00:07:30.780 For them, their conquest of the tribes that they encountered were guided by God, the ineffable. 00:07:31.459 --> 00:07:38.042 This became something that I had to deal with as I saw it in a way that hadn't been done before. 00:07:40.073 --> 00:07:47.243 During the 1930s, the right wing of Afrikaner movement known as the Ossewabrandwag was anti-Jewish. 00:07:48.449 --> 00:07:51.699 Like many of my fellow Jewish friends, 00:07:51.800 --> 00:07:57.694 I had a fear of Afrikaners from my childhood and yet felt the need to explore this. 00:07:59.353 --> 00:08:01.919 These people really absorbed me. 00:08:02.372 --> 00:08:06.918 They frightened me in their depths of the fear of black people, 00:08:06.918 --> 00:08:10.693 and yet at the same time their ease with them. 00:08:13.660 --> 00:08:18.158 I would be photographing an elderly couple on one of these plots 00:08:18.560 --> 00:08:23.770 and a little black girl would walk into the parlor, sucking her thumb 00:08:23.770 --> 00:08:29.250 and just stand there watching me work and they would not say a word to her. 00:08:29.250 --> 00:08:31.199 They didn't object and tell her to get out. 00:08:31.199 --> 00:08:34.334 It was just accepted that she would come in and do that. 00:08:37.955 --> 00:08:42.425 A common response from potential publishers was “where's the apartheid?” 00:08:43.305 --> 00:08:49.645 To me, it was embedded deep, deep, deep in the grain of those photographs. 00:08:51.053 --> 00:08:56.923 People overseas simply didn't grasp these extraordinary contradictions in our life. 00:08:57.778 --> 00:09:01.408 I was not interested in trying to explain things to them. 00:09:05.330 --> 00:09:07.519 We're heading into the center of Boksburg. 00:09:08.650 --> 00:09:12.860 I photographed here in the winter of ‘79 and again in ‘80. 00:09:14.620 --> 00:09:18.200 Instead of traveling the country and photographing whites generally, 00:09:18.200 --> 00:09:23.226 I wanted to concentrate on this one community and regard it as a microcosm of 00:09:23.226 --> 00:09:25.430 white middle class life in South Africa 00:09:25.430 --> 00:09:26.456 and that's what I did. 00:09:28.568 --> 00:09:32.690 This entire town was reserved for whites. 00:09:32.690 --> 00:09:37.841 Black people came here only if they had the right paper, a pass. 00:09:39.651 --> 00:09:44.780 I began to look at these crowds waiting at traffic lights to cross the road and found 00:09:44.780 --> 00:09:48.528 them remarkably exposing of us. 00:09:55.090 --> 00:09:56.790 Corner of Commissioner and Eloff. 00:09:56.790 --> 00:09:58.559 Oh, we must go up one block. 00:10:00.118 --> 00:10:06.708 This picture here was taken from where I'm standing now, of that shop there, 00:10:08.493 --> 00:10:12.000 and I was probably standing here when I took this picture. 00:10:14.620 --> 00:10:20.060 I was excited by this winter light that we have, it’s very sharp and low angled. 00:10:21.493 --> 00:10:27.643 These low buildings were to me, the quintessence of the world that I knew and grew up in. 00:10:28.348 --> 00:10:30.502 There's nothing distinctive about them. 00:10:33.720 --> 00:10:38.300 I don't think there is a single picture in that whole collection in which the subject 00:10:38.300 --> 00:10:39.999 is looking at the camera or me. 00:10:41.860 --> 00:10:44.159 I wanted to disappear from the equation. 00:10:46.497 --> 00:10:52.491 In Soweto and Hillbrow, the photographs were encounters between myself and the subject. 00:10:54.678 --> 00:10:58.990 Instead of trying to photograph life as an ongoing process. 00:10:58.990 --> 00:11:03.159 I elected to photograph people as they were in a formal way. 00:11:05.120 --> 00:11:09.586 I was always insistent that the subject would look at me, not at the camera. 00:11:13.810 --> 00:11:15.250 In doing those portraits., 00:11:15.250 --> 00:11:19.461 I became aware of people's bodies in a very emphatic way. 00:11:20.190 --> 00:11:26.374 Arms, and limbs, breasts, hips, necks, particulars. 00:11:30.824 --> 00:11:34.850 Here is a whole drawer of four by fives. 00:11:36.887 --> 00:11:43.381 On my death, my negatives, my contact prints, and my working prints, would have gone to 00:11:43.381 --> 00:11:44.500 the University of Cape Town 00:11:44.500 --> 00:11:50.596 where they had established an archival facility for this purpose. 00:11:52.306 --> 00:11:57.620 But after the burning of paintings and the burning of some photographs by the students 00:11:57.620 --> 00:12:00.220 in the university art collection, 00:12:00.220 --> 00:12:05.889 the university appointed a committee of academics and students to examine every piece of art 00:12:06.895 --> 00:12:08.329 with a view to deciding 00:12:08.329 --> 00:12:15.490 whether to pulling out or covering up any artwork that they regarded as potentially 00:12:15.490 --> 00:12:17.015 offensive to black students. 00:12:19.554 --> 00:12:28.042 Well, I can't accept that kind of valuation and interference in the freedom of expression. 00:12:29.515 --> 00:12:34.167 If there are pieces of work in the art collection that perhaps make other people uncomfortable, 00:12:34.167 --> 00:12:37.000 then let’s exhibit them, hold debates. 00:12:40.126 --> 00:12:44.250 I regard my work as one thing that I will not allow to be compromised, 00:12:44.250 --> 00:12:46.500 and I compromise every day, 00:12:46.500 --> 00:12:48.480 just by drawing breath in this country. 00:12:50.466 --> 00:12:54.679 But today under a democracy, I refuse to be complicit. 00:12:57.244 --> 00:12:59.061 I canceled my contract. 00:13:00.795 --> 00:13:03.897 And my stuff won't go to the University of Cape Town. 00:13:12.320 --> 00:13:15.189 I don't think I've ever been bored with photography. 00:13:16.949 --> 00:13:19.279 I have sometimes become extremely frustrated 00:13:19.279 --> 00:13:20.681 Ahh [bleeped]. 00:13:20.681 --> 00:13:21.626 Disgusted. 00:13:21.626 --> 00:13:22.279 Look at this. 00:13:22.279 --> 00:13:23.279 Look at this. 00:13:23.279 --> 00:13:25.839 but it's a life absorbing process. 00:13:26.518 --> 00:13:28.649 It absorbs me fully. 00:13:30.560 --> 00:13:35.543 I've changed my mind about photographs 25, 30 years after I've taken them. 00:13:37.360 --> 00:13:41.310 My problem is that I don't have 25 or 30 years to make up my mind now. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:44.207 I've got to make up my mind much sooner. 00:13:53.610 --> 00:13:56.365 I was doing photographs of the goldmines, 00:13:56.365 --> 00:13:59.377 and I saw a reflection of myself, 00:14:00.332 --> 00:14:04.584 so I just snapped it.