Regarding the white male
How does a person place himself in the current South African discourse when he is young, white and male? As someone who ticks all three boxes, this is a question I ask regularly as I seek to challenge myself and those around me while being sensitive to the historical social privileges that these variables afford.
Last week, the first feature-length documentary on photographer David Goldblatt made its world premiere in South African cinemas, probing me to consider this question in the context of the South African white male and the responsibility he carries when wielding his lens.
In the documentary, South African photographer and activist Omar Badsha accuses Goldblatt of being “naive” to his subjects’ position, particularly regarding his whiteness. He goes further by stating that Goldblatt is “complicit, like all white South Africans [during apartheid] who never really looked at the consequences of their actions”.
For Goldblatt, the terms “white” and “male” are irrelevant to the intention of the photographer and in the reading of their work.
“I don’t talk in those terms of white and black. I’m interested in photography. I’m interested in photographers’ visions. I couldn’t give a fuck whether you are pink, brown, black or white. If there are generic ways of looking that are associated with being white, I’m not aware of it.”
He goes on: “I frankly don’t know. I acknowledge fully that I am the product of a white, middle-class, Jewish home. I have a good education. All of these things make me who I am. But I don’t associate with the concept of a white gaze or a black gaze. It’s the gaze of a man who was brought up in a particular place and time. When I get a form from an institution and they ask my race I’m insulted. I say ‘human’. I couldn’t give a fuck.
“The fact that I’m turning my back on it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But I don’t think those are the relevant terms with which to couch the discussion.”
It is clear, as we sit in this 86-year-old man’s home in northern Johannesburg, that being a white liberal of a different generation, Goldblatt is riddled with contradictions on this idea that whiteness and maleness can be treated as blanket terms to refer to a particular gaze informed by two powerful social positions.
On the one hand, he refutes the significance of the key terms shaping conversations on the arts around the world, especially in South Africa where an exhibition can spark heated debate on the politics of who we give a platform to in our galleries and museums. On the other, he seems to acknowledge that a white positionality does exist but is unable or unwilling to see it himself.
Today, the ownership of a particular narrative is hotly contested and rightly so. This is most evident in the success of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex photographer Zanele Muholi who has been influenced by Goldblatt, but takes a very different approach, turning her lens on herself and her community to claim a part in the national narrative that black queer South Africans couldn’t do 23 years ago.
The fact that she also trains her subjects as photographers seems to