silver gelatin print

Artwork date: printed in 2013/2014
Signature details: signed on the reverse
Exhibited: Pace Gallery, New York, ‘David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument’, 26 February to 27 March 2021. Goodman Gallery, Online, ‘David Goldblatt Revisiting, Some Afrikaners’, 9 April to 30 April 2020. A4 Arts Foundation/Projects, Cape Town. 'Picture Theory'. 25 October 2018 to 24 January 2019. Centre Pompidou, Paris, ‘David Goldblatt’, 21 February to 13 May 2018. The Jewish Museum, New York, ‘South African Photographs: David Goldblatt’, 2 May to 19 September 2010. Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, 'Some Afrikaners Revisited', 24 October to 25 November 2006. Sainte-Anne, Arles, 'David Goldblatt Photographs', 2006. Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Fifty-One Years: David Goldblatt, February to May 2002.
Literature: Goldblatt, D. (2020). 'Some Afrikaners Photographed'. Germany: Steidl, illustrated on the front cover.; Goldblatt, D. (2007). ‘Some Afrikaners Revisited’. Roggebaai: Umuzi, illustrated on p.151.; Goldblatt, D. (2006). 'David Goldblatt Photographs'. Rome: Contrasto, illustrated on the front cover and on p.31.; Coetzee, J. M., Diserens, C. (et. al). (2001). 'Fifty-One Years: David Goldblatt'. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani and Actar, illustrated on p.87.

(1)

image size: 40 x 26.5 cm; sheet size: 43 x 30.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

Notes:

Other editions of this work are held in the permanent collection of The Jewish Museum, New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

David Goldblatt’s critically acclaimed series Some Afrikaners Photographed marked his entry into full-time photography in the early 1960s. It was during this period that he began to explore and document working-class, rural Afrikaner people, initially around the Randfontein district west of Johannesburg where he was also born and raised. Goldblatt’s subjects were small-plot owners, descendants of families impoverished following by the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Further afflicted by drought and the Depression of the 1930s, many had lost their farmlands and become displaced, with some migrating into the cities whilst others subsisted on small agricultural plots – many living as ‘bywoners’. The photographic essay for Some Afrikaners was completed in 1969 and published in 1975. In 2007, a new book Some Afrikaners Revisited was published which, with the exception of one image, included all of the photographs reproduced in the first book in addition to 20 never-before-seen photographs taken at the same time. This image of an elderly man, described as a pensioner, photographed with the child of a servant, in what appears to be the ‘voorkamer’ , taken in 1962, is one of the central works in the series and appears on the cover of the book.

Collections:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.; Institute of Chicago, Illinois.; Barcelona Museum of ContemporaryArt, Barcelona.; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Getty Center, Los Angeles.