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Relatives and friends of South African photographer David Goldblatt at his burial at Johannesburg's West Park cemetery on June 26, 2018. (Jerome Delay/AP)

Remembering celebrated photographer David Goldblatt

"David Goldblatt spent his entire career in his native South Africa, portraying black and white citizens in some of their most intimate and vulnerable moments," writes my colleague Matt Schundel of the celebrated photographer. "He ventured underground to photograph workers in the country's gold mines and entered black shantytowns and the segregated white churches and towns of Afrikaner hard-liners."

Mr. Goldblatt died earlier this week. He was 87.

For Schundel, and for many admirers of the South African photographer's work, his nuanced images "carried a vivid awareness of contradiction and injustice. Instead of police crackdowns on black protesters, he showed a 15-year-old boy with both arms encased in plaster casts after an encounter with security forces. He photographed people of Indian descent forced from their homes by race-based zoning laws; he portrayed people of all races at worship — but the black churches were sometimes makeshift structures of boards and sheets; he rode buses with black workers who spent eight hours a day commuting between distant townships and their jobs in the city."

This dedication to telling the stories of his native land made him a celebrity in South Africa. In an interview with a South African newspaper in 2005, he recalled that he was stopped along a highway, contemplating a photograph, when a black motorist recognized him and stopped to talk. "Then as he walked away, he turned and said — almost as though it were an afterthought — 'You are the guy who shows us things we don't see.' That is the most moving thing anyone has ever said about my work."

(David Goldblatt/Courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York)

David Goldblatt, penetrating photographer of South Africa under apartheid, dies at 87

His photographs of life on both sides of the racial divide contained "an unstated political significance."

By Matt Schudel • Read more »

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