My name is David Goldblatt, I’m South African
I’ve lived in South Africa all of my life
Photography has, for me, been the means
by which I have come to deal with
being a South African
Making photographs demands, on the one hand,
that you see reality with a kind of coherence
And on the other hand, it provides
the opportunity, the license
for looking at reality
in ways that are not normally permitted to us
I can look at social situations in South Africa,
as I did, for example, in Boksburg,
with an intensity and a focus
that would be difficult otherwise
In 1976, I had been in the United States
and in Canada, and wherever I went,
people wanted to know
who were the whites of South Africa
What were you doing that had aroused
this sudden revolution by students in 1976?
Boksburg is a small town
very close to Johannesburg, where I live
I realized that in fact, Boksburg
was tantamount to a microcosm,
a microcosmic look at the whites of South Africa
Boksburg held a whole complex,
a whole a bundle of qualities
that for me, spoke of South Africa
It had to do with the light
We have a harsh,
sharp, intense light where I live
It has to do with the land,
which is largely grassland and barren
It has to do with the way we did regulate life
in South Africa at that time
It was highly regulated
Blacks were not allowed to own land
in this town of Boksburg It was
exclusively for the possession of whites
In fact, of course, the largest part
of the population was black
But blacks were not allowed into the town
unless they had a pass,
which was literally a passport,
in the country of their own birth,
that allowed them, under certain conditions,
very— very tightly-specified conditions,
to come into the town of Boksburg,
possibly to work there,
whereas whites lived there by right
I was born with a white skin,
and so I could move freely into Boksburg;
I didn’t need a permit
So these were the conditions under which
black people lived, and white people,
and this is what I attempted
really to speak about in that essay
I somehow needed to convey in photographs
how normal, in an international sense,
life in Boksburg was; and yet how
insanely abnormal it was
Abnormal beyond— beyond any belief,
beyond anything you could imagine
You have to understand
that I photographed not for you;
I photographed for my compatriots,
my fellow South Africans, black and white
I hoped that they would sense
from these photographs a sense of our madness
And so the imperatives then were driven
by that understanding of the existence
of that place, in that light, at that time
and those people
Because they were my own people;
I come from this
I was opening up my own life,
my own background,
and looking at it microscopically
It was painful, yeah