Magubane and Goldblatt: a study in black and white
Two of the finest chroniclers of South Africa share the bill at an exhibition of their photographs
Two men born within two years of each other, one in the West Rand mining town of Randfontein, the other in the Johannesburg township of Vrededorp. One is white, the other black. Both of their lives are indelibly changed in their teenage years when the National Party comes to power in 1948 and entrenches the racial segregationist policies that the world soon comes to know as apartheid. Both respond to the injustices by picking up cameras and using them as tools to understand and expose the realities of South Africa.
Vrededorp-born Peter Magubane’s camera, as he would famously say, “was my gun. I was able to kill apartheid with my gun. I was prepared to die, to liberate this country with the pictures that came through my lens because I was liberating myself, I was dealing with issues that were affecting me. I could show the world how apartheid functioned, how oppressed people lived.”
For Randfontein son David Goldblatt, the camera was less a weapon than a microscope for a photographer whose “prime concern was with values, what did we value in South Africa, how did we get to those values and, in particular, how did we express those values?”
From the frontline of the struggle, Magubane exposed the brutal realities of life under apartheid, first for Drum magazine and later for Time and other international publications. He also served 586 days in solitary confinement for his “troublemaking” opposition to the regime.
As a documentarian, Goldblatt would see his work exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world; he gave audiences a means of reflecting on the deeper structures and social relations that allowed the system to perpetuate itself.
Although they followed their own paths, the two men’s focus often intersected and collided thematically, as the first joint exhibition of their work clearly demonstrates.
Polarised
Originally conceived several years ago, the show, in the words of curator Paul Weinberg, is not a retrospective of the vast bodies of work of Goldblatt and Magubane but “simply a conversation”.
It is also the first exhibition of Goldblatt’s work following his recent death, giving it an unintended poignancy. Magubane, now 86, had a solo exhibition in South Africa in 1961, making him one of the first black photographers to do so, and his work has been exhibited in universities around the world. This show marks a rightful return for him to the fine art world.
For Weinberg, the question is “why is this the first time, why didn’t they exhibit before?” He believes that, “if you go back to the ’80s, things were so determined, polarised and defined and Peter was the photojournalist out there, David was the considered, quieter documentarian, so there wasn’t a natural meeting point. With reflection we can revisit their commonalities and their legacies and how we reflect and celebrate those.”
During the 1980s, when the debate between frontline photojournalists and social documentary photographers reached its peak, Weinberg, who was himself a frontline photographer working for the collective Afrapix, recalls a conversation with Goldblatt in which he said: “You know, Paul, I just think that my photographs are irrelevant. My value is redundant.”
Weinberg, who has known both Magubane and Goldblatt for more than 30 years, believes that “at that time there was a currency in news photography — and South Africa remained top of the pops in terms of the world story for over a decade — [but] in retrospect, looking at the value of slower, quieter documentary, it always has a place and David is an exemplar of how important that work is”.
Weinberg has organised the exhibition by subjects of common interest to both photographers — Afrikaners, Johannesburg, Soweto and the mines. He’s also given space to each man’s particular interests — Goldblatt’s extended project on the destruction of Magubane’s birthplace, Vrededorp, his examination of structures and the landscape of the country both during and after apartheid; and Magubane’s famous coverage of the June 16 protests in 1976, his work as official photographer for Nelson Mandela and his post-1994 documentation of the cultural identity of South Africa, which he saw as a means to “show the beauty of South Africa . . . not the blood that you are used to seeing. I love my country and the beauty of my people.”
Goldblatt famously once described himself as “a coward. I run away from violence, I don’t like violence and confrontation.” Magubane put himself on the barricades and defied not only the authorities but even the students in Soweto in 1976. He recalled winning the youngsters over by telling them: “Listen, a struggle without documentation is not a struggle. Let us capture this, let us take pictures — then you have won.”
This might make it easy to see Magubane as being more courageous than Goldblatt, but for Weinberg, “although David wasn’t being beaten up or arrested, he took incredible courageous stands in his life and went where other people feared to tread — he was strident in his views about censorship and where the country was going”.
Weinberg says the showing of both men’s work together reveals them as
“two courageous, tough men who really stuck to the task”.
Humanity
While both continued to document South Africa after apartheid, for this show, Weinberg recognises that the “overriding intersecting theme is apartheid”. In that context it is necessary to acknowledge that race affected the careers and positions of both photographers. Goldblatt, in spite of his disgust with the racial policies of the time, was, by virtue of his whiteness, allowed privileges that were not as easily accessible to Magubane. This is something that Goldblatt acknowledged throughout his career — he knew that he was able to walk into platteland Afrikaner homes and Boksburg community halls because of his skin colour, while Magubane and other black photographers had to constantly fight to be able to be present in the often violent situations they covered and faced severe consequences were they caught.
However, it seems clear from the few interactions between the two men — the last one a film of them meeting shortly before Goldblatt’s death and shown as part of the exhibition — that although their approaches and attitudes towards their photographic projects differed, they had a deep mutual respect and appreciation for each other’s work.
Asserting and enforcing difference as a means of exercising power over citizens has been a fundamental feature of the history of South Africa. It’s something that we constantly grapple with, and it often seems to threaten our ability to come together when needed, but it’s also something that we have managed at crucial moments to overcome. Perhaps this is ultimately what the work of these two different men shows us, thanks to what Weinberg describes as “their deep commitment to humanity and finding that humanity under the most difficult circumstances”.
In their own particular ways, both have helped to create a better world than the one into which they were born, miles apart in so many respects.
In this, their work — as academic and critic M Neelika Jayawardane writes in her catalogue essay for the exhibition — “whether about the unspoken violence underlying the value system of apartheid, or the violence that made it explicit, is the work of the thinker, the idealist, the freedom worker”.
On Common Ground: David Goldblatt & Peter Magubane is at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until August 18