New book offers comprehensive
David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive coincides with a major retrospective exhibition organised by Yale University,
When internationally acclaimed photographer David Goldblatt worked on commissions for Optima, an in-house publication of Anglo American, more than 50 years ago, he would often assign himself stories on topics in which he was interested, besides doing public relations images for the company.
He suggested to editor Charles Eglington, who was most interested in good literature and good photography, that they should do an essay on Soweto township, which was hardly known by South Africans, in particular white people, in the 1970s.
“The township was a very strange place. It was not a slum. It was a vast series of government-built houses and these houses were specifically designed to prevent or discourage people from putting down roots,” he said during his presentation at the Design Indaba Conference in Cape Town 2014.
“They wanted people who live there to be labourers in the so-called white economy and to go back home to their tribal homelands.”
With the assistance of writer and poet Sipho Sipamla, his friend, Goldblatt was introduced to singer Margaret Mcingatha in Zola, Soweto. He made an exquisite blackand-white portrait of her lying comfortably on the couch smoking, and that photograph would be the first of many to follow, marking a turning point in how he worked.
“He was very clear that he was making a photograph of a person and whether he or she participated or not, that was their choice,” said Brenda Goldblatt about her father’s work.
She was addressing an audience during the launch of the book No Ulterior Motive, which was held at the David Krut Bookstore in Parkwood, Johannesburg, on 3 February.
Goldblatt was a documentarian – a compelling storyteller who verbalised through the lens his personal experiences as a white Jewish man living and working in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. Over six decades, he documented the country’s developments beyond physical violence as honestly and straightforwardly as he could, without political affiliation.
He “shunned public posture, allowing it little place in his photographs. This approach helped lower the temperature set by the many postured dramas of daily life in apartheid South Africa,” writes Njabulo Ndebele in the preface.
The book is based on the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and The Art Institute of Chicago. It is the first posthumous monograph on Goldblatt, who died in 2018, and it accompanies the artist’s first retrospective in the US since 2010.
It is the most extensive presentation of his body of work to date, and shows Goldblatt’s continued relevance through the participation of photographers from several generations tracing themes that resonate through his working life.
The commentaries give readers a wider perspective of Goldblatt’s personal and professional life and the difference he made through mentorship, generosity, care and love for his fellow South Africans.
In 1989 he founded the Market Photography Workshop, which has produced many flourishing photographers mostly coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
During the panel discussion with photographers Ruth Motau, Andile Bhala and Terry Kurgan, Brenda admitted to not liking the title at first.
She explained that when her father was documenting Hillbrow and Soweto simultaneously, he would put up notices wherever he could at post offices and in newspapers’ classified sections to get access to people’s homes to capture intimate portraits. He would use the phrase “no ulterior motive” to try to signify that he was not looking for sex.
“I felt that they picked words that had very little to do with David’s practice …made him feel very inexact with his relationship with what he was doing,” she said.
Nevertheless, she praised the quality book design and content, including the cover photograph, which she had seen many times but never thought of much.
She said it was almost like they took “my father’s orthodoxies and challenged them in a way that I think it’s fantastic”.
A week later, I visited her brother Ronnie Goldblatt at his home in Norwood to find out how he had managed to store and archive his father’s work.
“My dad made contact sheets religiously in his darkroom and would write numbers so we could easily find his images,” he said.
“He often used a medium format, twoand-a-quarter-inch square camera for portraiture and a four-by-five-inch view camera for structures and landscape, and by writing 2/ or 4/ at the beginning on the contact sheet, he indicated to us what camera he was using on that particular shoot.”
The edited images would be backed up on computers and Google Drive, and raw shots would be stored on three hard drives to be kept in three different locations.
The esteemed photographer is known for his sharp photographs using the from-nearto-far technique. He often used a four-by
Goldblatt was a documentarian – a compelling storyteller who verbalised
through the lens his personal experiences as a white Jewish man living and working in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa