DAVID GOLDBLATT: The camera is a very strange instrument.
It demands first of all, that you see coherently,
it makes it possible for you to enter into worlds, and places, and associations,
that would otherwise be very difficult to do.
Being a photographer is a wonderful thing, really.
I'm not tied to any place.
I can go and come as I like.
It's wonderful.
My childhood years in Johannesburg were very happy.
We enjoyed an enormous amount of freedom.
We would ride our bicycles all over the Randfontein Estates, which was the goldmine around the town,
and we could explore the mines to a great degree.
It's a brutal landscape, it's very bare, bleak, we don't have a sea, we don’t have a big river.
We just had these rather dull and uninteresting spaces.
I think there was a kind of osmosis taking place in me,
I became organically related to the place.
On the one hand, I want to photograph the land.
Land, in a very broad sense.
On the other hand, I'm fascinated by our structures as declarations of value.
I'm too late for this photograph, the trees are already in leaf.
I’m going to try.
Let's have a look.
It seems to me that the style of architecture that is emerging to the north of Johannesburg,
is a kind of an aggressive materialism.
In this country, because of the nakedness, almost, of the struggles that took place between
black and white,
the structures that emerged were amazingly clear demonstrations of value systems.
White Afrikaner Protestant churches are those that I think of particularly.
Their churches had these huge windows and this mega phonic structure,
come the 1970s the forces of liberation are coming down to South Africa,
increasingly impinging on Afrikaners.
So, their new churches become defensive.
There are very few of them built with piercings in the outer walls.
Public structures become clear manifestations to self-image.
Look at this, look at this, huge building, but at least this has got a certain amount
of movement.
That’s a Hasselblad.
Famous, very expensive, beautifully built box.
My brother Dan would come back from somewhere in the world and bring little miniature cameras.
He brought back from one of his voyages a Contax camera.
The Contax was the Zeiss equivalent of the Leica.
It was a great camera, but this particular one had been severely damaged.
I don't know what its history was during the war, but when it eventually reached Randfontein,
it was a very sick camera, but I tried to do some photography with it.
When I matriculated in '48, I certainly had a strong wish to become a magazine photographer.
“Life” and “Look from America,” “Picture Post” from England were the
window on the world for millions.
In 1952, I think it was, the apartheid government had begun to put its ideology in place and
one of the first steps was to separate the races in public amenities.
I did a short strip of film of a black man going up and then being turned back by a black policeman.
He had been accustomed to taking that route into the Johannesburg railway station and
suddenly he was not allowed to.
So I sent a strip of those photographs to “Picture Post” to the editor.
I was politely rejected.
I tried to do a magazine story about the men who worked on top of the mine dumps around
our town.
These men worked right through the year, every day and night,
no matter what the conditions, dealing with the waste of the milling operation.
We were subjecting these men to a terrible existence.
It is freezing cold on the top of those dumps in winter.
Here's an old dump.
It's been covered in grass to keep down the dust.
Black miners could not rise beyond the level of what were known as boss boys or team leaders.
Of course, they were not boys, they were men.
In order to rise above that level, you had to have a blasting certificate,
and this was a method that was used by the white trade unions to ensure that
only whites could go into the upper echelons of the mining hierarchy.
If one wanted to look at this society,
you had to grasp the nature of white Afrikaner life and ideology.
The Afrikaners were descended from the Dutch and French Huguenot, and German, Scotch, early,
early settlers in this country.
Small as that group was, they determined a great deal of what happened here.
For them, their conquest of the tribes that they encountered were guided by God, the ineffable.
This became something that I had to deal with as I saw it in a way that hadn't been done before.
During the 1930s, the right wing of Afrikaner movement known as the Ossewabrandwag was anti-Jewish.
Like many of my fellow Jewish friends,
I had a fear of Afrikaners from my childhood and yet felt the need to explore this.
These people really absorbed me.
They frightened me in their depths of the fear of black people,
and yet at the same time their ease with them.
I would be photographing an elderly couple on one of these plots
and a little black girl would walk into the parlor, sucking her thumb
and just stand there watching me work and they would not say a word to her.
They didn't object and tell her to get out.
It was just accepted that she would come in and do that.
A common response from potential publishers was “where's the apartheid?”
To me, it was embedded deep, deep, deep in the grain of those photographs.
People overseas simply didn't grasp these extraordinary contradictions in our life.
I was not interested in trying to explain things to them.
We're heading into the center of Boksburg.
I photographed here in the winter of ‘79 and again in ‘80.
Instead of traveling the country and photographing whites generally,
I wanted to concentrate on this one community and regard it as a microcosm of
white middle class life in South Africa
and that's what I did.
This entire town was reserved for whites.
Black people came here only if they had the right paper, a pass.
I began to look at these crowds waiting at traffic lights to cross the road and found
them remarkably exposing of us.
Corner of Commissioner and Eloff.
Oh, we must go up one block.
This picture here was taken from where I'm standing now, of that shop there,
and I was probably standing here when I took this picture.
I was excited by this winter light that we have, it’s very sharp and low angled.
These low buildings were to me, the quintessence of the world that I knew and grew up in.
There's nothing distinctive about them.
I don't think there is a single picture in that whole collection in which the subject
is looking at the camera or me.
I wanted to disappear from the equation.
In Soweto and Hillbrow, the photographs were encounters between myself and the subject.
Instead of trying to photograph life as an ongoing process.
I elected to photograph people as they were in a formal way.
I was always insistent that the subject would look at me, not at the camera.
In doing those portraits.,
I became aware of people's bodies in a very emphatic way.
Arms, and limbs, breasts, hips, necks, particulars.
Here is a whole drawer of four by fives.
On my death, my negatives, my contact prints, and my working prints, would have gone to
the University of Cape Town
where they had established an archival facility for this purpose.
But after the burning of paintings and the burning of some photographs by the students
in the university art collection,
the university appointed a committee of academics and students to examine every piece of art
with a view to deciding
whether to pulling out or covering up any artwork that they regarded as potentially
offensive to black students.
Well, I can't accept that kind of valuation and interference in the freedom of expression.
If there are pieces of work in the art collection that perhaps make other people uncomfortable,
then let’s exhibit them, hold debates.
I regard my work as one thing that I will not allow to be compromised,
and I compromise every day,
just by drawing breath in this country.
But today under a democracy, I refuse to be complicit.
I canceled my contract.
And my stuff won't go to the University of Cape Town.
I don't think I've ever been bored with photography.
I have sometimes become extremely frustrated
Ahh [bleeped].
Disgusted.
Look at this.
but it's a life absorbing process.
It absorbs me fully.
I've changed my mind about photographs 25, 30 years after I've taken them.
My problem is that I don't have 25 or 30 years to make up my mind now.
I've got to make up my mind much sooner.
I was doing photographs of the goldmines,
and I saw a reflection of myself,
so I just snapped it.