Obituary: David Goldblatt, photographer

died June 25, 2018

David Goldblatt, who has died aged 87, was a South African photographer who documented the apartheid era with an unflinching eye, earning a reputation as the “visual conscience” of his country.

Though he had a stint working for Leadership magazine during the 1980s, photographing leading political figures, Goldblatt did not regard himself as a news photographer concerned with events such as riots, violent confrontations or demonstrations.

“As a citizen of the country, yes, of course I am. But as a photographer I am interested in the causes of events,” he said in a 2013 interview. This he did by documenting the ordinary lives of his fellow countrymen, black and white – and for the majority of his career, in black and white – as they went about their business, riding the bus, walking to church, shopping at the market.

Beginning with On the Mines (1973), which had text by Nadine Gordimer, who was later to win the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, Goldblatt produced a series of books that reflected the stark divisions in South African society.

Some Afrikaners Photographed (a title as stark and straightforward as his portraits) followed in 1975, but during his career, Goldblatt examined scenes as apparently unpromising as abandoned houses, cemeteries, industrial buildings and road intersections and found in them a way of conveying something of the nation’s turmoil and division during the years of segregation.

Other major projects included photographing the victims of the Aids epidemic and a series of pictures of ex-convicts at the scene of their crimes.

Goldblatt’s work was also widely exhibited; his first major show was at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1974 and in 2001 a retrospective covering more than half a century of his work was organised by the MAGBA, Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and travelled to New York, Lisbon, Johannesburg, Rotterdam, Oxford, Brussels and Munich over the next few years. His work represented South Africa at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

His photographs are now held in the permanent collections of a number of major international museums, including the Victoria and Albert, MOMA in New York, the Getty Centre in Los Angeles, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. A documentary film of his work, directed by Daniel Zimblar, appeared last year, and he recently had a major retrospective, which opened in February at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

He documented the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, when student protests led to the toppling of a statue of the colonial figure at the University of Cape Town. Goldblatt acknowledged the importance of discussion about problematic art, but thought that the students (who burnt the photograph of a white woman who had been a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle) were fundamentally anti-democratic. When the university appointed a committee to vet the art it owned, he declared it an affront to free expression and cancelled plans to bequeath his archive to them. Yale University Art Gallery recently acquired the majority of his work.

David Goldblatt was born on November 29 1930 in Randfontein, a gold mining city in the West Rand about 25 miles west of Johannesburg. He was the youngest of three sons; his father Eli ran an outfitters and his mother Olga (née Light) had been a typist in a clothing company. Both parents had arrived in South Africa at the turn of the century from Lithuania, when David’s grandparents moved to escape from anti-semitic pogroms.

Goldblatt became interested in photography in his last years at Krugersdorp High School, inspired by magazines such as Life, Picture Post and Look, which were at their zenith. His father gave him a damaged Contax, a German camera which his older brother Dan had scavenged while serving in the Second World War, but his initial efforts were unimpressive. “I was very ill-equipped,” he told an interviewer for Frieze, “not just mechanically, but in the beginning, I had no idea how photographs work together.”

He was asked to cover an ANC rally for Picture Post, but found, after two hours of snapping, that the sprockets had failed to catch the film. “It was persuasive evidence that I wasn’t suited to news work,” he said. Instead, he got a job with a wedding photographer, where his principal role was to wander into shot when any guest with a halfway decent camera was taking a picture, and ruin it.

Goldblatt entered the University of Witwatersrand, from which he earned a degree in commerce, and worked at his father’s store. He then spent three months in Israel, where he acquired his first Leica. But though he took it on after his father’s death in 1962, he lasted only a year before deciding to sell and pursue photography as a career.

He began with conventional and corporate work, and during the late 1950s and early 1960s worked for South African Tatler, as well as contributing to the London-based Queen and Town. He travelled to America, but found it difficult to interest publishers there in his work.

But soon his other projects, examining the lives of gold miners for his first book, and then black workers who travelled long distances by bus to work (published as The Transported of KwaNdebele in 1989) brought him wider attention. Until the 1990s he shot on monochrome film, usually working in natural light and sometimes holding the camera steady with jury-rigged bits of string held tight under his foot.

Though he thought colour “too sweet a medium to express the anger, disgust and fear that apartheid inspired”, after the collapse of the regime he began to work with the form, finding digital technology allowed him to produce the nuances he had achieved in black and white in the darkroom on colour screens.

Goldblatt cited writers, mainly South African, as the major influence on his work, though in his early career he made a close study of a series of books by the American photographer Ansel Adams, which had a huge impact on him.

He remained strongly committed to protesting injustice and oppression, and found much to object to in the new South Africa, after the collapse of apartheid. He received numerous awards, including the Hasselblad (2006), Henri Cartier-Bresson (2009) and the Lucie Award (2010) and several honorary doctorates. He declined the Order of Ikhamanga in 2011 in protest at a bill which proposed to limit freedom of information in South Africa and restrict access to government records.

He married, in 1955, Lily Psek. She and their three children, Steven, Brenda and Ronnie, survive him.