David Goldblatt’s work traverses political and real geographies in which world-political themes and the history of South Africa are reflected in each other. Recently Goldblatt created the series of works called Platteland Intersections, photographs of the rural regions in the South African provinces, which were in a state of fundamental change. David Goldblatt’s spiritual and intellectual position, his partisan stand in the struggle against apartheid, his view and interpretation of cultural developments in the country are unequivocal, though not ideologically one-dimensional, in that he covers the whole range of the social and societal spectrum. Technically, Goldblatt works with large-format analogue photography today, and the color of the images, which are left unchanged in terms of motif detail and proportion, is manipulated on a computer. The technical possibilities of enlargement enable him to achieve high contrast differentiations. In recent years, he has expanded his themes to critical research in Africa and Australia, in association with the differentiation permitted by color photography.
David Goldblatt
Kite-flying, near Phuthaditjhaba, in the Qwa Qwa bantustan, now Free State, 1 May 1989, 1989
