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: Witte de With - Event - David Goldblatt speaks about his work
Chairman of the Boksburg Town Council Management Committee, Councillor Chris Smith and Mrs. Smith at home, 23 June 1980
Type: artist's talk Date: July 14, 2003 at 17:00 hours Location: Witte de With, Rotterdam
This presentation is organized in the context of the first retrospective of David Goldblatt?s work in Europe, David Goldblatt - Fifty-one years (June 30 - September 1, 2002).
In the presentation Goldblatt commented on the retrospective of his work and the details surrounding the actual moment the photographs were taken.
As a citizen and as a photographer and witness to apartheid?s penetration of every aspect of life in South Africa, Goldblatt became an explorer of values and ??far more engaged by the states of being that lead to events, by the conditions of society rather than the climactic outcomes of those conditions.?
Over the years his probings have led to a number of photographic essays from which the present exhibition is drawn. The exhibition traces Goldblatt?s major themes, among them his work on the gold mines among which he grew up, the homeland transport of segregated people, life in a small-town white community, the portrayal of Afrikaner people, architecture as an expression of values, and recurring from time to time throughout his working life, aspects of Johannesburg, the city in which he lives.
Goldblatt is attracted to these outskirts of South Africa, a country founded on racial discrimination, due to his identity as a grandson of Jewish immigrants who fled from Lithuania because of the anti-Semitic persecution.
